[Colchester] Net Neutrality - It's the end of the world as we know it

[Wayland Sothcott]

Sam Tuke wrote:
> Regarding ISP modem/router problems and linux: recently I set up a few people's new talk talk adsl connection for them with PCLinuxOS. I had some problems because one of them was using a wireless router without a modem to transmit the data from the talk talk modem, and problems were incurred. However, it seems that theses days what talk talk is doing is sending out the modems without the access passwords or mac address or any other info about them for that matter so that you can't access any config whatsoever on the modem (which has an html based interface). There's just stickers all over it saying that you shouldn't try and configure the router at all and if you have questions phone them (where they can choose whether or not to give you the access codes to the modem you have just bought from them). Bear in mind talk talks reputation as offering some of the worst tech support, involving logic trees which end in a handful of irrelevant answers (most often, "please hold").
>
> To me this is like buying a car and paying monthly road tax and insurance, only to be told by the dealer that your not allowed the keys except under very special circumstances. I sent them a raving email about false advertising, misinformation and their war on consumer interests. No reply so far. I really hat having to support appalling products like this when friends and relatives have moronically dozed into a year long contract.
>
> Virgin and Talk talk: steer well clear of these!
> ----------------------------------------
>   
Good advice to steer clear of Virgin and Talk Talk. However in some 
areas Virgin have LLU or Cable so might be a better choice that going 
through wires provided by BT. I am suprized that being in the position 
to recomend Linux you were not able to get them onto a decent ISP. 
Tiscali are not known for being much good but a customer of mine was 
happy with them at £17 per month but were persuaded to switch to Talk 
Talk because the Internet would be free. Since their phone was with Talk 
Talk they did not need the MAC number that Tiscali sent. They switched 
to Talk Talk and found that GotoMyPC nolonger worked, which was one of 
the main things she needed, also the speed was crap. Tiscali of course 
were still sending her bills since they thought she was still with them 
having not activated the MAC number. Nightmare. She solved it by moving 
house, seriously.

I can understand sending out a pre-configured router but they should 
give you the login just in case you need it. People who don't know what 
they are doing would never manage to get the web interface up anyway, 
but people who do get in will be OK, except for the odd meddler, you 
always get them. However I suppose if you chose Talk Talk you must be a 
bit of a numpty and probably not even know you don't have the password. 
I have a perfectly good BT Voyager which I can get into, but it only 
accepts BT account names. This is a waste of the Earths resources and 
global warming etc. Free to anyone who wants it.

When you think about it, it's amazing that we can just buy any router 
and stick the settings in and use it on any ISP. There are ISPs who try 
to use the packet Time To Live (TTL) number so the packets die after one 
hop, meaining that they get killed by the router. Some routers even have 
a little trick to add one to the TTL just so it still works, very 
sneeky. Sounds like something from Blade Runner.

When I were a lad, there were a generation of machines running CP/M. In 
1979 this was all the rage, right up to about 1987 I think. This ran on 
the Z80. There were loads of CP/M Z80 machines and they could run the 
same programs if you had them on the right floppy disk. Each machine had 
an arbitarily different sector size and track spacing. Obviously this 
could be got round but it was enough to kill the casual pirating of 
software and sharing of data. Thankfully I think we are smart enough to 
get round such problems these days, but it's almost always bad for the 
user and the computer business as a whole if these restrictions are in 
place. It makes pirating of software a job for the professional pirate 
thereby creating a pirate industry that would otherwise not exist if 
people could steal stuff themselves.