Suzy, Drinker Of Coffee

Broadband

Remember I mentioned my order with EFH Broadband? Well, I got an email earlier today, as I was looking for my activation date – by my estimation, it should be mid-late this week. It’s tomorrow i.e. Thursday. Good. It’s the usual BTWS time of “up to 6pm”, so it could be at any time betwen midnight & 6pm on the day of actvation.

So, I came home from work, and decided to have a play around. I had a SpeedTouch 330 modem (which I despise, largely on the grounds of sloppy coded drivers for Windows XP which cause 680 errors, and their technical support staff being rude and aggressive to us at work, despite moving from Belgium to Amsterdam. They once accused a BT home worker senior manager of having an illegitimate copy of Windows, despite me advising them that the computer was supplied by his employers i.e. BT.) So, I tried their drivers twice – nothing.

I dug out the old Intel 3220 which I had from last time. Some customers had problems getting these to work on 2mb, but it’s worth a shot – especially as I’d heard one of our 8mb trial people had – allegedly - used one of these fine on 8mb. So, installed the old original 3320/3240 driver, and rebooted.

It powered up.

It got sync after about 15 seconds.

It CONNECTED at 8.1mbps, with 50 minutes to go until the start of my activation date!

Now, even I was surprised by this! The line test expected me to get 6.5mbps, and here I was getting 8.1mpbs in plenty of time! After downloading some stuff – one piece of software that last night was going to take three and a half hours, downloaded in ten minutes. My mail was finished getting picked up within seconds… I rebooted, and had to remove the plug of the modem before it got sync. No fear, that happened sometimes before too – especially if you booted via ScanDisk. Anyway, on at 7.5mbps – can’t complain about that… 40 minutes into it, lots downloaded, Mix 100.5 streaming in the background (yes I am sad, but the first thing I could find to prove it was all working!) – and someone tried to port scan me, all within the hour. And, yes I do know it’s probably because I am just round the corner from the exchange (three minute walk), but for some reason I am getting more upload (about 450k) than some Telewest customers right now - a very rare bit of one-up[wo]manship!

As you can imagine, I went to bed (a few hours later!) very happy…

posted by Suzy Scott @ 23:58