Charles on… anything that comes along

The email I got last week said that broadband would be set up on my phone line on Tuesday, by 5pm at the latest. To be precise: ADSL activation has been provisionally appointed for: 2005-06-21.

But on everyone’s advice I’d bought a Netgear DG834G and was itching to get it set up. And I thought, well, hell, there might be someone else on this phone circuit who’s already got ADSL, or is getting it today, so I could at least get everything ready for the Great Day.

Microfilter - check. Plugged into ADSL modem/router/wireless access point. Power - on. Hey, the ADSL light is coming on. I wonder…

I plugged in the Ethernet cable and logged in, and set it up. Doing the ADSL bit was easy - username, password.. the Netgear did its autodiscovery very neatly. Hey, it’s broadband, and we’re on it! A day early!

The wireless stuff… hmm. Clearly, using Apple’s Airport [Express] has spoiled me. There, you choose an alphanumeric password, input it as the WEP password, and off you go.

On the Netgear thing, you choose your password, which is then turned into hex, which you then have to paste into your Apple system. I kept getting “There was a problem joining..” Which is frustrating until you learn that you have to prefix hex keys with $ when entering them on Apple Airport systems. Then there’s firewall rules (rule 1: don’t bother with rules), changing the admin password…

Overall, it all felt like your second time gutting a fish. You know basically what you’re doing, and where the bits should be, but you keep coming across stuff and going “Uh?” Using Apple gear really spoils you when it comes to this sort of bit-wrangling.

And there it was, working. Broadband! At last! Perfection! Oh, hang on, can’t send email. Aagh! No, it’s just a DNS problem - phew. Sorted.

So what’s it like? Not, on reflection, like the dramatic arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. It’s more like the lifting of a curse - the curse of worrying that by being online you’re preventing someone from calling your landline (we get lousy mobile reception indoors), of looking at the modem’s elapsed time and thinking “If I start that download now, it’ll cut out before it finishes..”, of sloooooow page loads (which then ties up your machine as it waits helplessly for adverts to refresh themselves from servers that are beyond reach). It’s really not important what the speed is. What is, is ending the reliance on the plain old telephone line for your internet access. And that’s really where the future ought to be.

Plus it’s nice being among the majority again. Though I’ll have to change the page now..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• On Ballmer and Media Centres, BT's Broadband Voice and how sight kicked off evolution's Big Bang (12 October 2004; score: 52.19%)
• Dialup is a pain (5 July 2006; score: 50.21%)
• Underpromise and overdeliver: thanks, Freedom2Surf (8 July 2006; score: 44.23%)