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ADSL welcome mat

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:03

Dave Jewell cracks open the champagne as ADSL finally arrives on his doorstep and smells something fishy in Windows XP

I'm now in a position to report on the arrival of ADSL at Chateau Jewell. Having ordered the system, I received written confirmation telling me BT would carry out a remote line test from the exchange, and sure enough, mysterious things began happening to our phone system. When we answered a call, there was nobody there, and on dialling 1471 the exchange informed me that nobody had actually called. Spooky! I spent several days waiting for that fateful bit of paper to tell me whether I was ADSL-positive or negative. Nothing came, but on the appointed day a BT engineer arrived to fit the splitter box - obviously, my line had received a clean bill of health.

ADSL works by carrying the digital data on a high-frequency carrier, leaving the audio frequency band for ordinary phone use - the splitter plugs into an ordinary BT master socket and contains low-pass and high-pass filters that isolate the high-frequency data from the audio signal, and vice versa. There are two sockets on the face of the splitter: one a standard phone socket and the other a connection to the four-way BT Ethernet router, which is a rebadged SpeedStream 5861 from Efficient Networks (www.efficientnetworks.com).

That's right, I'd decided to bite the bullet and go for the Business version of BTopenworld, not least because I didn't fancy messing around trying to get the USB 'frog' to work under Linux. More importantly, I didn't relish the prospect of being locked into an eternal triangle between BT, AN Other ISP and myself, with me playing piggy-in-the-middle. Perhaps naively, I gambled that I'd also get a better quality of service (and, if nothing else, a lower contention ratio) by going for the Business option. I'm happy to report that - thus far - this gamble has paid off as, at the time of writing, I've had a glitch-free connection for almost two weeks, and being able to surf at 512Kbits/sec certainly puts the fun factor back into the Net.

There were only a couple of minor hitches. First, the engineer left me a cross-over cable to connect the router to my first PC: it should have been a straight-through cable, but I spotted the mistake. More annoyingly, I never received my 'Welcome Pack', which meant I had to have a hand-holding session from a BT support person who gave me the correct subnet mask and DNS server info. Even so, I feel pleased that everything was up and running on the same day as installation.

A year or so ago, I signed up with Giganews (www.giganews.com) because of the quality of the newsgroup feed. If you've ever tried to download a large binary from a newsgroup, you'll know how frustrating it can be to find that some vital part of the download is missing, having been deleted by the server. Giganews offers virtually unrivalled message retention on its server - around two weeks for binary groups and three months or more for normal text groups.

This quality of service isn't free - Giganews has various pricing options. Since getting ADSL, I now regularly go over my monthly download limit, and I've had to sign up for the 'recycling' option which buys you another month's worth of access. Let's hope my credit card can take the strain.

Fishy facts about Windows XP

Over the last couple of weeks, the pace of Windows XP releases has increased and we're now expecting the first Release Candidate. Having spent time with the latest builds, I'm delighted to retract my earlier comments about 'Fisher-Price' colour schemes. It's clear that the lurid blue default colour scheme you get when first firing up Windows XP isn't the only option: there's now a more subtle olive green scheme, but my personal preference is the silver scheme which you can see in this month's screen shots. However, the most interesting news from a developer's point of view is the way in which all this is handled through a new theme API.