Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Welcome to the 21st Century

Yes I've finally had broadband for two weeks at home now. As I've been an Orange subscriber since it was owned by PCW Group and called Freeserve I copped out and stuck with them. I then saw the latest Which report listing them as an 'avoid at all costs' - nice.

Anyway my Livebox turned up the middle of week and all I had to do was wait for the email telling me it was active and ready to roll... and wait... and wait. Ah who am I joking I took it out and plugged it straight in. So I bypassed the dumb installation routine and jumped straight to the box settings after cracking the dumb as molasses username and password (changed that), set up the wireless, set up the encryption, got my PS3 to find it, changed the channel frequency to something that the PS3 would detect at greater then 50% strength (there's one wall and about four foot of distance between them), surprise surprise no connection I'd better wait for the email.

Pfft yeah right I left it for a day and then tried it in the morning - nope; evening - nope. Next day morning - nope; evening - yep a whopping 8Gbit download speed. So I've been happy checking out the PSN Store (and listing its faults, to be published) and all is well.

I find a letter waiting for me this afternoon from British Telecom informing me that they've had a request to switch my rental from them to Orange (quite correct) and that this would take place on 3rd September... so I'm using the BT line with the Orange Broadband? Well that's kind of neat isn't it I wonder when Orange will start charging me :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

8 Gbit/sec?

Well that pretty much 0wns my piffling little 2.2 Mbit/sec I have at home, or even the 5.0 Mbit/sec that my employer is currently paying £27,000/year for. (Mind you, that's symmetric. It needs to be!)

Tell me, do you actually get the whole 8 Gb?

FlipC said...

Pure luck I guess as to location, current speed as I type is 6944kbps downstream and 448kbps upstream so it does vary from time to time.

Loading Yahoo in Opera I max at 98KB/sec and average 70KB/sec before it loads. At work with a 6mbps it tends to top out at 60KB/sec.