There's been various very useful comments about ADSL on the list. However...
NTL now seem to be offering a 128K cable modem service for only £14.99 a month. It's not exactly clear what they supply, or what they expect it to work with, but based on this: http://www.ntl.com/locales/gb/en/home/broadband/services/need/ it seems that as you need "USB port (recommended) - if not present Network Interface Card (Ethernet Card)" they are supplying some sort of device that is can do both USB and Ethernet. However, as they appear to be expecting you to have a Mac or a Windows PC (minimum requirements also include sound card. Yeah, right, like I need that for an IP stack) it's not clear how Unix friendly all of this is. I'm aware of people using Linux boxes on the ends of NTL cable modems, but these were older cable modems, and at higher speeds. (And I suspect that they will have been cutting down the price of the device, although it doesn't yet appear to be an internal "win-cable-modem") So, does anyone know 1: If these devices will run attached via Ethernet to any machine running any OS? [or does the device require their software to help bootstrap it] 2: If the service requires their software to be run (on either MacOS or Windows) to do the initial setup and service activation? [or do you just tell your OS where the DHCP server is and wizzo you're away] 3: If the service is locked to a particular NIC on an Ethernet card? [I believe that I have been told that at least some versions of their service are, in which case it seems that you have to be able to run their software on a Windows or Mac capable of physically containing the Ethernet card from the device you actually want to use. Note that it is quite likely possible that I'd want to use not-a-PC as the first thing attached to the outside world] 4: How practical this sort of thing is when the incoming cable (or BT ADSL feed, for that matter) is not anywhere close to the room where the computer would like to be. I think there's a fifth question, but I've forgotten it. T Nicholas Clark -- Brainfuck better than perl? http://www.perl.org/advocacy/spoofathon/
