[SWLUG] Broadband

[pbhj (swlug)]

On Friday 19 January 2007 18:26, Tony Pursell wrote:
> Well here's my experience:
>
> Started with dialup Freeserve. Got their 512K broadband and an ADSL modem
> for 27.99/month with no download limit.  OK on Windows but no go when I
> wanted to try Debian Linux.  So I got a Netgear DG834G wireless ADSL
> router. Has 4 Ethernet ports as well, so dead easy with Linux.  Does DHCP,
> DNS, NAT, Firewall, etc.
>
> Freeserve morphed to Wanadoo and now Orange.  

I've come through the same changes. Only that I held out until Wanadoo offered 
1 Meg ADSL at same price as my dialup (£14.99).

I have a Thomson Speedtouch USB modem which works fine. Connection is pretty 
good and I get most of the advertised bandwidth (bit narrow for my 
requirements really but can't afford to upgrade).

Only ever made one service call (back in the Freeserve days) and they were 
completely ignorant. They don't support Linux though and they block 
connection to other SMTP services.

I have a bootup script that starts the connection (USB remember) sometimes 
after long idle periods the connection seems to fail and I have to stop and 
restart the connection (for which I had to write a script to kill pppd and 
modem_run).

Thinking about it now that seems quite a hassle ... but I run Slackware so 
such fixes seem quite natural!