Re: [Hampshire] [OT] BT Broadband?!

On 14/07/2011 13:05, Bob Dunlop wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jul 14 at 12:19, Chris Dennis wrote:
>> * I need a new wifi router anyway, and I'll get a free one with BT.
> You can buy a wifi-adsl router for under a tenner online.
> I think the one BT "gives" you retails for about 25+VAT without the
> broken firmware.

I've got a Home Hub 1 somewhere - it worked at the beginning, and was
useful when my original cheap replacement stopped working, but the
Netgear I replaced that with has worked solidly ever since. BT Vision
still works through it, and there is no danger of me becoming a FON
hotspot. Home Hub was never as flexible as the Netgear, and hid lots of
useful stuff in its arcane menu system. I've only tried FON itself a
couple of times - in quite residential parts of Andover I got a couple
of networks identified, but I only ever connected to one of them once
with a tiny bandwidth, and the connection dropped terminally after 10
minutes.

The broadband has been down twice. The first was when the extension
cable from the phone socket to the router failed, and the other took BT
support a short while to sort out - this Indian call centre was pretty
efficient.

I only went with BT because otherwise they'd have charged me £50 to
remove my ISDN line. I've generally been happy, and keep on getting
useful discounts to keep me that way. I get 6.5 Mbits on an 8Mbit line,
which is good enough for me.

The only real problem I have is that one of the BT-supplied Comtrend
mains ethernet devices stopped working last night, but I've had it
several years now. Time to put in a proper Cat5/6 cable in!

Simon