Following on from my questions about Bigpond cable wireless I though I would let you all know how the self-install went.
I ordered a cable-wireless modem on a unlimited plan last week, and it arrived as promised Monday, after going to the post office to collect it, I forgot to bring my username and password ( newly assigned as part of the ordering process) home, and had to wait until last night to try the install. As Bigpond make it quite clear that they will not sell you a self install unless you are running WinDoze XP I took my laptop ( XP Pro) home to do the install. Install procedure is very simple and well guided by the cd, basically you insert CD in WinXP machine and it leads you through the steps, including the physical connection of the cable modem to the wall and the usb or pcmicia card to your PC. Problem was after running through the procedure I got the dreaded " your computer cannot detect the modem, please call bigpond support and quote the folliwng number" I dutifly called Bigpond and after being placed on hold for approx half an hour I got through to someone who said, " just rerun the procedure but connect the Ethernet cable to the modem, and this will solve your problem". So I did that, and the same result, at this stage a little frustrated I called again, another half hour wait ( I guess this must have been around 11.00pm eastern states time" I got though again to a different person. This Extremely helpful person stepped through the whole procedure with me, including installing the USB modem drivers and trying via USB, Ethernet, my built in wireless ( Not supported by tesltra) and the supplied usb wireless. At the end of this, probably two and a half hours later ( including 25 mins on the phone with this support person), the telstra guy said " do you have another computer we can try as I think the wireless in your XP is not working", I replyed " I have several other computers but they are not supported" he said " oh are they Macs'" I said " yes" and lo and behold he said and I quote " well I don't know much about macs but lets give it a go" Plugged my aged G3 iMac snow ( 10.4.0) into the modem, clicked on internet explorer and typed the supplied modem address and less than two minutes later ( using the excellent Motorola html based config program) I was surfing the net using the modem, another three minutes later I had enabled the modem firewall, wep key and wireless broadcast and connected my G5 using airport. Bloody fantastic, 100% satisfaction report to the Telstra support guy who was happy to go the extra mile and Mac wins again, and I still can't get my XP to work wirelessly!! Best Regards Hugh Griffiths ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This e-mail, including any attached files, may contain confidential and privileged information for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution, or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive information for the intended recipient), please contact the sender by reply e-mail and delete all copies of this message.
