Viewing Thread:
"To Broadband Or Not To Broadband"

At the moment I have a standard 56k modem on the BT Surftime ISP.

I am a big downloaded and feel my connection needs more speed, so I was just wondering weather a change to Cable and Blueyonder was a good idea or not.

If you could tell me about the download speeds etc that would be great too.

I was also wondering if I would be able to have two PC's connected to the internet seeing that you can use the phoneline aswell. Or is that not possible?

So basically, is it worth what you pay for according to speed diffrence and realiability?

Thanks,
MWA

The box I use as a router was just one that was lying around the house gathering dust that I meant to throw away years ago. An old 486, 8meg ram. Had windows95 on it but I downloaded a vanilla copy of linux from somewhere on the net that fits on a floppy. You just use that as a bootdisk, so it doesn't need much of a harddrive. As long as you have 2 NICs, the spec of the machine isn't really important. You're only using it to handle the internet feed.

I can go in to a bit more detail if you want, if you're thinking of doing the same...

Ajg, just out of interest --

What spec / distro is the firewall box? Are you using ipfadm/ipchains/netfilter+iptables? Did you set it up yourself or use a firewalling tool?

(Go penguin!)

:)

*runs and hides in shame*

lol and ur ping weren't BY type either.... most of my clan m8's have l33t pings.

My internet just stopped working a minute ago, all the lights are normally on, but only 1 was, and nothing was responding. Cut me off my To game, but luckily after about 5 minutes the modem started responding again. Mustv'e been a fault with telewest somewhere. But other than that it's been fine since i got it, which was a couple of weeks ago :)

SiLenT-Sc0pe[UK²] wrote:
> 11 days for me ! Can't wait ... seems that BY dial up is getting too popular.

doesn't matter, it's always a 50:1 server ratio, so even i it is popular, I doubt they'd make it smaller.

sorry but this is a dumb question, if you live in the area and can afford Broadband, of course it's a good idea! get it, and you'll be very happy, downloads are a sinch.

also, you need to buy a router for seperating the modem, all you do is plug the network cable coming from the modem into the router and four network cables come out of the router into (max of 4 pcs) all get around 100k, which is still twice the speed, it seperates the bandwidth evenly, very good system.

you need a good spec pc to run it though, lots of ram.

At school we have 6 computers through a single 56K. It's not slow at all, only if someone downloads something or views a large Flash file, etc...

11 days for me ! Can't wait ... seems that BY dial up is getting too popular.

I've just got Blueyonder broadband too, and I've got to say - it rocks.

I fed the cable modem connection to a Linux box to act as a router for two other PCs, so that I can share the access. So now as well as having a free phoneline, I have two other PCs with permanently-on internet connection.

Yeah you would need to network the two computers and share the internet connection, I currently do that with a 56K modem and it is ok until someone downloads something then everything slows down an awful lot.

I am trying to get my dad to get a cable modem but we are unsure who is the best ISP. We aren't in a suitable area for BT broadband but can get NTL's cable modem line.