[Herefordshire] Broadband connection.

[Mark Broadbent]

Hi Noel,

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 07:47, Noel McG. wrote:
> Now does anyone know if the modems that either Tiscali or Wanadoo supply are
> Linux compatible?

I tried to find out what modems they supply, but couldn't.  I'm assuming
that both Wanadoo and Tiscali supply a USB speedtouch modem for which
there are Linux drivers, however they are binary only (quite flaky and
difficult to set-up from reports I've had) and will require some
compiling to match the Linux kernel you are running. 

As has been stated by most people, a router is best.  For several
reasons:

* Ease, extremely simple to set-up and get running.
* Offload of PPPoA encapsulation and modem interface means that it
provides a simple Ethernet interface and
* Lower latency for online gaming (might be important - I don't know!)

> If not, have any of you got reliable broadband connections up and running at
> present, with other ISP's.  Bearing in mind that this is for private
> purposes and needs to be reasonable.

I would highly recommend Zen Internet as a provider, consistently fast
and reliable.  In fact my first outage (since signing on in Feb '04) was
last weekend but turned out to be a BT problem.

HTH
Mark