Hi All
I am impressed:D, just got my ADSL fitted 31/12 and its great.
I have installed a firewall and networked the wife pc onto it as well.
Boy is it quick showing 576Kbps.
Is there anything else I need to do?

All the best
Pete

Hi My self and Shark are netmeeting too its great plus your phone can still ring,but we have had none for aprox 2 months because our servers are w$$$$$$s i car't even say there name but anyway we are moving over to BT 10th Jan so we will be back on again, car'nt wate we have missed it so much.

chel xxx

Chel
I have BTOpenworld, I know it is early days but I am impressed.

Pete

We had Tiscali providing our ADSL connection. It has been unusable since 30th November. Going to BT Openworld on 10th Jan. Can't wait :D

David

All xDSL in the country at the end of the day goes via BT, so it doesn't really make any difference as to who provides it.

Ian

Point taken, but it matters when your service provider don't provide ;)

David

cant get it due to the ba**ards at BT [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

I have adsl, me fink I need a good firewall!!

I had zonealarm, but reduced my connection to the spped of a normal modem! bunch of arse

Shark,

i know what you mean, however there are so many factors that can affect a DSL signal that most of the time i dont even think it is the ISP's fault! (i cant believe i have just said that)

DSL runs over the normal 'copper pair' that your phone line uses, it is just that the DSL signal is a lot more susceptibale (sp?) to interference, and is probably why a lot of prople experience problems. the only real way to get a good connection would be to have your DSl comming directly from the DSLAM to your CPE (Alcatel Fish in BT's case ;) ) using less than 1m of wire, then DSL would actually work.

A lot of the infrasturcture that BT currently has in place across the UK just cant handle the needs of DSL.

Ian

Ian,

And in both our experiences, there would be a case to argue that Broadband in general (affordably at least) is not really doable reliably yet either ;);)

Chelsie, why the name change BTW and Pete, welcome to the Broadband fold m8 ;):D

Matt :)

I think I've been very lucky living where I live (well, re broadband :rolleyes: ). The state of Flanders heavily subsidised the cable companies to turn the TV cable infrastructure into broadband cable. I think something like 90 % of the households here have cable TV, so it may prove worth while in the end.

Mind you, they had to replace *all* cabling, which I guess must have cost a fortune.

The speed is really only limited by how many people are active on your node (= street), and since most people in my area are even older than me (is that possible ? :) ) I have a constant 10 Mbit connection to my provider. It is really nice to be able to download an Office service pack of say 50 megs in about 2 to 3 minutes :eek:

Price is about UKP 28 per month for 2 "official" PC's, upload limit is 2 Gig, download 10 Gig. Downtime has been < 5 hours for the last 8 months. Installation was UKP 130 when I got it, but is free now.

Davyboy, your comment re: ZoneAlarm puzzled me a bit. I have it running here, and it doesn't really show down things to be honest. Could have been a config/registry issue ?

Matt, i'm not complaining! i got rather a nice amount of compensation from them for my hassles! ;)

I have replaced the sh1tey usb modem with an alcatel router which also is a wireless base station and has a firewall built in.

So now I can surf at 512Kb speeds from anywhere in the house, safely :-)

well worth buying. They do a version without the wireless base station too...

EvilBevel - you said "The speed is really only limited by how many people are active on your node (= street)" - any ideas how the nodes are split with NTL Broadband?

I live on a rather large housing estate, so there's probably likely to be a few people online, but the people in my housing 'block' aren't likely to be using cable modems! ;-)

So does each node serve a normal number of subscribers or something? I'm just curious...

Cheers

Den

Den, I'm not familiar with the UK situation, but I would assume they will use the same concept of "headstations" (don't know how it's called in English) serving an x number of houses. The more houses/appartments in your street, the more chance you'll have of getting some slower speeds.

I used to have a link to a website that can test your speed, but I lost it in a PC swap ... anyone still has that one ?

Thanks EvilBevel - problem is, the housing estate that I'm on consists of nearly 400 houses. If there's one point serving all of these houses, am I likely to see a slowdown when all of my neighbours decide to log on? Surely they must split it up for a fault tolerance point of view, if nothing else? Say, if some idiot decided to dig the road up and take the cables with it?

Or am I worrying over nothing? - probably ;-)

It's just I'm likely to go NTL broadband in the near future, forewarned is forearmed as they say, especially if I'm signing up for 12 months...

Cheers,

Den

the average contention ratio on NTL bradband is about 1:50 IIRC

you can test your speed using the bandwith test on http://www.2wrire.com

PeterUK300,

Don't you actually work for BT ?

Cheers Phill C

IanW -

Cheers for that.

Den

bt plz burn in hell... just had mine disconnected.

IanW,

I don't understand how you get the figure ?? 50 to 1 what ?

Cheers Phill C

50:1

Its 50 users to a single access node.

These were teh figures that were discussed with NTL when we were considering doing some work with them on it.

Ian W,

LOL, 50 users per node that doesn't seem right!!! How many homes are on each node ? How many nodes per UBR ? Is that a 6 MHz (Dosis) or 8 MHz (Eurodosis) channel plan ?

Cheers Phill C

god Phil! your making me think on my first day back!

IIRC NTL are tunning the 8mhz EuroDOCSIS.

I'm just trying to find the figures for NTL that i have on my system somewhere!! :rolleyes: why do i archice things away!

Ian W,

Really surprised that NTL are using Eurodocsis equipment as I thought the standards are still being finalised, plus I also thought that the Motorola SB3100 and SB4100 weren't Eurodocsis compliant!!! I'm also sure the Pace 1000 and 1010 DHT isn't able to use a Eurodocsis carrier for interactive.

TW use a 6 MHz Docsis 64 QAM carrier that is shared between 3 to 4 nodes normally. Each node can contain upto 2,100 homes, but usually TW nodes (Optical) are 525 homes passed. All CPE (customer premise equipment i.e. cable modem and DHT digital home terminal) use that carrier (at 331 MHz) so the bandwidth is shared between all CM and DHTs connected to it. The 6 MHz carrier has a 36 Mb per second payload, so all equipment will share this. TW have monitoring equipment that can count both CPE connected to it, plus give a real time SNR (signal to noise) measurement to ensure a quality signal is being received back at the headend. If the CPE exceeds a pre-determined level, then we re-segmentate that node, or add additional UBRs to cope with the traffic.

To answer how many CM are attached to a node is a very difficult question to answer. Depends of the sales penetration really.

Hope this helps a little, Cheers Phill C

phil glad u cleared that little issue up for us.

i was gonna have a sleepless nite tonite worrying about it til you posted the easy explanation :rolleyes: :p ;)

Steve,

Just read it myself LOL, not sure I understand what I'm trying to say!! There are lots of ifs, ands, ors, etc. to take into account to answer that question of how many CM per node!! Easiest way of answering (i guess) is it below maximum capacity of the UBR ;) :confused:

I can dig some more detailed explainations out if anyones interested ;)

Cheers Phill C

UBR.....hmmm utterly boring rubbish ? ;)

oh yes do dig out some more info......might help me sleep at nite D: :D

Steve,

LOL, utterly boring rubbish!!! I suppose it is ;) UBR = Universal Broadband Router.

Cheers Phill C

its only Uttlerly Boring Rubbish when you let the local 'techs' near it! they seemed quiet good at killing the one my cable modem goes through! ;)