I’ve just gotten NTL broadband at home, signing up for the 3Mbps offering which is very nice indeed. So far I’m seeing download speeds of around 70 kbps which is a bit slow to be honest but I understand that the service isn’t quite working to maximum capacity yet. I’m willing to wait. It’s worth it after 3 successive wireless broadband providers failed to hook me up citing the usual reasons of
- too busy to look at it yet as we’re trying to grab all the customers eircom has disappointed with the lack of ADSL availability
- too poor a signal
- no line-of-sight
- too many trees
- wrong star sign
- eyes are the wrong colour
- wrong time of the month
- yadda, yadda, yadda
Anyway, the NTL cable modem is neat and tasty and hooks nicely up to my linksys wireless router. However, a word of warning. If you want to retrofit a wireless router to your installation you may have to MAC spoof as the DHCP lease for your location is obviously based on MAC. My linksys router supports this via “cloning”. NTL installation staff aren’t exactly clueful on this front so you’ll have a lot of messing around to do if don’t pick up the problem straight away. Other than that’s it’s a straight “obtain IP automatically” installation. A word of warning about the Linksys WRT54G router though. The firmware upgrade to v 3.1 is essential for security reasons and its interoperability with NETGEAR 54g cards is less than sensational for anything less than basic WEP. (it doesn’t work)So kids my router is mac restricted, much good it will do me