It appears that they are now part of O2 and hence Telefonica which would imply some level of financial stability.
They also have an LLU facility at my exchange. However, one wonders how fast the connection can be and actually whether they are overstating capabilities for marketing reasons. I do not live in the car park of the telephone exchange; rather several km away and with a section of aluminium cable. It would be surprising if an LLU provider using essentially the same technology and the same wires can do much better than BT Wholesale.
I would have to discuss the static address requirements as I need at least a /28 for my purposes.
i'm not saying there is anything wrong with using an LLU provider, but people should be aware of what they are getting into. A number of people ahve signed up with a LLU ISP without realising the implications if they want to move later.
Assuming the ISP's network is adequate, which isn't necessarily true
There's proprietary and proprietary. It isn't as though I would run EIGRP on it...
At least with IOS I have a familiar environment and feature sets where I know exactly what the results will be and nothing that locks me into a particular ISP or set up. For that matter, I can change the interface cards should I need to do so. I get support, new software versions and features several years into the future rather than pretty much nothing from the consumer products.
Having looked through the docs. it's clear that the Firebrick is intended for professional use. However, it's a relatively unknown product from a little UK company, seems to have limited performance and by their own admission pretty much EOL. If it were in the £150-200 bracket, I wouldn't mind. However, by the time one has paid £350 for it plus two feature sets (bonding and possibly traffic shaping) that would be needed at two decent ADSL modems at £50 a pop because the Firebrick has ethernet presentation, it is getting very expensive for what it is - pretty much the same as an 1841 bundle two ADSL cards.
I suppose that I could put together a Linux box with two DSL cards. The issue there is that either one has to use one of the lightweight distros that inevitably doesn't have a wanted feature, or to handcraft a setup from something like FC5 or equivalent. The latter can be very time consuming.
For this exercise I really need something that I can bring into service quickly, apply the ACLs etc., have a good degree of confidence that it will operate reliably.
I certainly wouldn't consider buying a service from a reseller, but Entanet appear to be somewhat more substantial. If they are providing the service and support and the reseller is simply making a margin then that's perhaps less of an issue, and OK for a home use connection.
Just use Debian. It can be as light or as heavy as you like. I'd say you could have it up and running in an hour if you know what you are doing, or an hour and a half if you follow a tutorial.
~Yes, I'm familiar with these types of thing and of course could spend time doing them. The basics are not complex. There is more complexity when one wants to do link bonding, traffic shaping and the like. After all of that, one needs to do a very careful audit of the machine to make sure that everything is clean and vulnerabilities are absent. That is a lot more time consuming to do properly.
I've had no problems at all in the twelve months or so that I have had it. Connection was painless and all billing is handled by Entanet anyway. So easy that I have used it to connect my mother as well.
Only problem that I have had is a billing issue when. I was cut off when my card issuer gave me a new card and as a result the credit card payment was bounced. But one phone call to Entanet and I was back on within ten minutes.
As far as technical support goes both Entanet and UKFSN are quick to respond and seem to know what they are talking about. I use UKFSN for email.
And, with UKFSN the profits goes to support free software development.
for 19.95 a month get a 30Gb limit and and extra 300Gb
Well, ukfsn looks pretty good - the best I've seen so far, a sensible range of peak / off peak allowances. And perl scripting for free. I am going to order now ! Simon.
24Mbps is the theoretical maximum speed for ADSL2+ but I'm pretty sure no one in the real world will ever see anything close to that. We're pretty close to the exchange and get about 15Mbps.
Well, the line is the same, but the technology is ADSL2+ which is an extension of ADSL and I'm pretty sure BT Wholesale aren't offering that at present. When I signed up with Be* the only other two who where offering it where Bulldog (who I won't have anything to do with) and Easynet (who I thing were very expensive - but they may offer more in the way of SLA's - they are also now owned by Sky I believe which may put some people off).
I'd be interested to know what sort of speeds you would get over such a dodgy line.
I think we pay about £10 extra for our /29 range but I'm pretty sure /28 was available.
Same here. I've been paying 25 quid a month for years - started at 600Kbit and was (until yesterday) up to 4MBit. Rang them up to see how their ADSL offering worked in terms of contracts etc (my parents are looking) and they quoted 17.99 for ADSL and I'd expect to get 6.5MBit. Given this was less than I was paying for a slower connection I got them to transfer me to the cable section (cable and adsl is still obviously two seperate sections).
A little bit of asking why the price difference and I've ended up with TV-L and 20MBit broadband for 20quid a month.
I didn't even have to argue....might be worth giving them a ring :-)
Saying that, I'm finding that I can't pull much more than 6Mbit in the evening anyway but 18Mbit down this morning was nice :) Also, th big win for me is the better uplink - I'm now getting >700kbit which is a big gain for me (certainly makes X11 less soggy :))
I'd be interested to know how people find the virgin media ADSL offering. Their
1M service for 15 quid a month, no up front charge and 1 free house move a year looks good for my parents (they are hoping to move in the next 6 months)
I have one of their cable connections and it is OK for some purposes. It is a pity that they have dynamic addressing and persist in the use of caching. For certain downloading it is useful, but I would not use it for business purposes.
It also would imply that they, as a broadband outfit owned by a mobile telephone company, are just one step away from turning into a talk-talk sky-broadband orange-broadband all-inclusive f-r-e-e all-you-can-eat over-hyped over-subscribed over-loaded night-mare ...
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