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Dave Berkeley wrote: > Hi All > > I've got a broadband account with UKFSN. They are retailers for EntaNet. > > EntaNet notified me that they would be upgrading to 21CN last Monday and that > this would mean a downtime of 10 minutes. > > Sounds like you're getting the runaround. Unless you're in Wales or a big city as far as I know you won't be on 21CN for a year or two. You can check the exchange using the Sam Knows Broadband checker here - http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php If you enter your phone number it should give you some more exchange details. For instance on my exchange (http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/WWSHIP) the 21CN switchover date is set for Q4 2010. I'd have thought it would be more likely that you've been switched to Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) which as far as I know all Enta customers who aren't on 21CN (not sure about the ones that are) should be on now. > The connection went down for around 30 hours. You can't phone UkFSN and > EntaNet's technical support was poor. They said it was a problem with BT at > the exchange, which may well be true. > > Get yourself registered on the ThinkBroadband forums (http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/) and go into the Enta sub-forum. Jason at UKFSN is generally on there and is pretty quick at responding, chances are someone else might have had the same problem. From what I gather Enta's technical support has gone down somewhat over the past couple of months and they're now into the habit of fobbing customers off (hence the 21CN suggestion that they gave you). > Today my connection went dead again. Can't get through to UkFSN. EntaNet > contacted BT who said that I had been online today (this morning; I had) and > the problem was resolved. It was only when I phoned again (this time using > their wholesale broadband freephone line 0800 804 8041 - they put you through) > that they realised that it was a second fault that I talking about. > > You could try using the BT test login which disregards Enta's network alltogether, you can find details here: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/bttest.htm It does require though that you enter new login details in your router so make sure you note down the username and password before you try it (I've got caught out on this before and had to run around trying to find the paperwork from the ISP). > Still no connection. Has anyone experienced similar problems? > > The only problems I've had recently with Enta is slow speeds in off-peak times. From what I understand they have a facility now where if a lot of bandwidth is being used on one of the nodes it will throttle everyone's speed down in chunks to give everyone a reasonable connection. There has been speculation on the ThinkBroadband forums though that the throttling is over agressive and slowing users connections down to about 100KB/sec or worse (I have had this myself, logging the router off and logging it back on seems to fix it - I found this works better than pulling the power or phone line out of the router and putting it back in lots as it make's BT's systems think there is a problem and it switches you to a lower speed profile and slows your connection down which requires a call to Enta support to be reset). > Can anyone recommend a better provider? Virgin Media say they can provide me > with a fibre connection. Has anyone any experience of this? I would really like > to ditch those incompetent wasters at BT. > I wouldn't touch Virgin Media with a 10ft barge pole. If you download over a certain amount during certain times of the day your connection speed is throttled down (see more here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/virgin_media_throttle_extension/). If you check on Sam Knows Broadband for your exchange details it may tell you if there are any LLU providers on your exchange (for instance, Sky/UK Online, O2/Be, Talktalk etc) who could possibly provide a cheaper and better connection (O2/Be are unlimited and can provide up to about 20 Meg's a second depending on your line length, Sky and Easynet can provide up to about 16 Meg, Talktalk can provide up to about 24 Meg if you pay extra for it). > Incidentally, I had lots of fun setting up an Acer Aspire One netbook as a > mobile gateway, forwarding my server traffic through it, and using it as a > gateway for the home network. In the process I found that the last Ubuntu > kernel upgrade has broken the eth0 driver. I also had to route round my ISP's > SMPT so I could send email. So I have a nest of routing modifications, DNS > resolver mods, NAT etc. > Are you using some sort of mobile broadband dongle to do this? Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html