no subject

[taimatsu]

As this is a rare public entry, FYI, Robert and I are no longer an item, and I have moved house within Reading. This was not my decision.

I need to organise an internet connection for my house. I would like wireless broadband. I will have an ntl cable modem, a wireless access point thingy, and a router thingy, as well as a wireless card on the laptop. There will be three or four of us using the connection, and it would be nice to have decent speeds even with most or all of us using it at once.

I have not shopped around much yet - I have looked at the ntl site (because I suspect that would take very little effort to organise) and I have realised I am not sure what speed we would need. Can any friendly geeks make suggestions? What else should I be taking into account? I should probably also organise security for this network - how can I best do that?

Comments

[lnr]

Oh. I thought you'd been quiet.

I suspect even the slowest NTL connection should be reasonable, unless you are downloading films or similar. New NTL connections include the modem, and you might find you can get phone/broadband/telly as a package for quite cheap.

But if your current phoneline is with BT do check out ADSL - you'll still need to pay your BT line rental for the phone, but some of the ADSL offers are pretty cheap. Not all of them come with a router/modem though, so if you already have all the NTL kit I can see why that looks preferable.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

unless you are downloading films

or everybody wants to play Warcrack...

[taimatsu]

We probably don't want the whole package, just the net connection. Thanks for the input :)

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

I'm not actually sure if NTL do the net connection as a standalone item; they seem to prefer doing it in a bundle (we have it as part of our cable TV service, along with a phone line we don't use).

While I second the point that their customer service plumbs new depths of appallingness... appallation... being crap, the service does Just Work, in my experience (3.5 years).

As far as security for the network goes, that should be handled by your wireless router. Many (most?) of them come with some built-in firewalling which will help.

[taimatsu]

Their website suggests they do, but hmm, yes. Customer service. :/

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

The service does generally just work, once installed.

It's getting it (a) installed and (b) uninstalled that was enough to put me off them ever again. The worst incident was when they kept billing me for 6 months after I've moved despite several phone calls and two letters telling them not to, and finally passed it to debt collectors.

[kake]

I've heard this sort of thing from a lot of people. Don't go with NTL. It's not worth the hassle.

[fluffymark]

The main (only?) advantage of going with NTL is the combined connection, so not needing to buy a BT line. So if you're planning on using a BT line, you'll find an ADSL connection over the BT line to be faster and cheaper (not to mention much better customer support) from any number of different ADSL providers. Go for the cheapest speed unless you particularly need a ultra-fast connection. Your wireless access point should have built-in security that you'll probably have to activate. You can set a password key and/or restrict access to specified computers.

[taimatsu]

We don't have a house phone at the moment. I think my downstairs housemate might actually have a landline, but I have no idea how/why/when/through what company this was set up. I should find out...

[taimatsu]

Um, but I think there is a phone connection, somewhere. We just don't use it.

Are there any downsides to ADSL?

I'm worried that people might want to use VoIP telephony or other things which might require decent speeds. I don't know, and I do want the option to play ludicrous games or call people in Australia if I like. We can afford at least £25/month, as that's only £5 each between three - probably more would be ok.

[fluffymark]

The only downside to ADSL is needing a BT line, costing £11/month for the line rental even if you make no calls at all. But I believe NTL broadband requires you to get a NTL phone connection with a similar downside.

You'd also need to find an ADSL modem if the ISP doesn't provide one for free. I used to have a couple of spare ones but I stupidly gave them away last year.

Neither VoIP nor most games are particularly bandwidth-hungry, and should quite happily share even the slowest 512Kbit/s broadband connections amongst a few people. Only if you're doing lots of REALLY large downloads (films, basically) is lots of bandwidth needed.

Here we're getting ADSL from Zen Internet, which isn't the cheapest by a long way (£25/month on top of the BT line rental) but it is very fast 8Mbit/s and their customer service is impeccable, and well worth the extra money.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

One potential problem with ADSL is the complicated way the administration works; BT own the phone line and offer a wholesale ADSL service to other providers, who then connect their own network to the other end and sell the whole package on to you. What this means in practice is that if something goes wrong, they have to often go through BT to get it fixed, which can be complicated, and BT charge them quite a lot to investigate problems. However, I've never actually heard of this actually causing trouble for someone using ADSL, whereas I've heard many stories of NTL being incompetent.

These days the "standard" ADSL service is ADSL Max (introduced only last month, so lots of people will have the older kind of ADSL service, but most or all new deals are probably ADSL Max). This offers *up to* 8mpbs (1MB/s) download speed and 432kbps (54KB/s) upload speed. However the actual speed will be determined by what your line can support; here, about 8 miles from the centre of Cambridge and about 3-4 miles from our exchange, we get about 3mbps download and maximum or near maximum upload. The real limits on usage will be placed by your ISP, who will give you a certain traffic allowance per month, typically measured in GBs or tens of GBs. The price will mainly depend on this allowance.

When I asked around last month before getting ADSL, the typical usage by one person seemed to be <10GB. However none of the people I asked were using VOIP heavily, downloading films or playing online games much. The deal I finally chose was with Eclipse, who offer a yet more complicated price plan they call "Evolution", with costs ranging from £15/month to £29/month (IIRC). The traffic cap ranges from 20GB-50GB (again IIRC), but only applies between 6pm and midnight. In addition to this they restrict the speed of your connection at busy times (known as "contention"); the cheaper your price plan, the more restricted it will become. I chose the cheapest option and haven't ever noticed it being unreasonably slow (and this is with aendr and I both using it at times). A couple of other OxIRCers have been using them for a while and seem pretty happy with the service.

There are obviously plenty of other providers too, e.g. Xen, Black Cat, Nildram. Avoid BT Openworld (which is the service where BT themselves sell you ADSL), they don't have a very good reputation, though I can't remember specifically why.

If you happen to pick Eclipse, if you do it via this link (http://www.eclipse.net.uk/index.cfm?id=referrerredirect&type=broadband&referrercode=GANESH) I'll get a referral bonus of I think £30 which I'd be happy to split with you (it doesn't cost you anything extra to do so).

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

This may not be feasible or desirable for your specific circumstances, but after being an NTL customer on a few occasions I would avoid them like the plague - ADSL would be far preferable, purely from the point of view of avoiding NTL's truly awful customer service.

If you don't have and can't (easily) get a BT phone line then this isn't an option, however.

[lovingboth]

Oh poo.

What do you want to do with your net connection? I downgraded the speed of mine recently - couldn't tell the difference. On the other hand, I need it to be unlimited, none of this 1 Gig of traffic a month crap.

[imc.livejournal.com]

We are currently paying £17.99 per month to NTL for the 1M service (the cheapest, which was 128k when we first took it out in 2002). However, the terms have at various times appeared to require you to have a phone line too for £9.50 (but I haven't checked recently). We have this, but are not using it (and cable telly too, but we are using that). The phone line came first, because it could make free calls to the University dialup service; but once broadband was available that kind of stopped being useful. Except during a power cut.

But anyway. It "just works" 99.9% of the time. We only once had to call someone out and it turned out the cable modem had died. There were some patches of bad connectivity, but that was a while ago now. They have changed our IP address from under us (while the connection was up) twice in the four years we've had it — that means the connection suddenly stops working for no apparent reason until you restart network services on the machine that's connected to the modem.

1M is sufficient for both of us to do more or less whatever we want, but "whatever we want" doesn't usually include downloading films or whatever. Downloading a multi-megabyte file can make the connection sluggish for the other users for a while. Upload speed is only 100kbits, so don't try to run a popular web server or the connection will ground to a halt. :-)

Only caveat: try not to use any of NTL's services beyond the physical net connection. They aren't up to much.

[stronae.livejournal.com]

I am sorry to hear about your separation. As for speed, 'need' is purely in the eye of the beholder, so to be safe, buy as fast as you can afford. It'd probably be easiest to combine routing and wireless into one device (with a firewall of some sort), so you have centralized management. Use reasonable WEP encryption (unless there's something better nowadays, in which case use that), keep your keys long, and don't broadcast your access point's name.

Beyond that, do all the smart small office things -- keep all internal machines running services on a DMZ if at all possible, have antivirus/antispyware on clients locally enabled and running, and make sure internal client machines are NATted behind the firewall. If you want to have file shares internally available from one internal computer to another, make sure users are authenticated before being allowed access. (I.e. in Windows, make sure people must log in to a domain first. In Linux, make sure resources are under group control, and logged-in users have privileges in that group.)

Other things to keep in mind: if you're going to wander about to locations in the house where you won't get signal, you'll probably need a wireless relay/repeater/whatever they call those things nowadays. For maximum compatibility of wireless devices, though this shouldn't matter, see if you can get all your wireless hardware from the same manufacturer, and recall that Linksys is a little dodgy. (I'm not happy with their implementations of things at present.)

Good luck.