Slashdot Mirror

Nope. This isn't a problem with CPE support for IPv6, it's a problem in BT's network.

There's some more information in this discussion thread:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=btsupplier&Number=3448119&page=1&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart=

This was discussed in the forum digitalspy.co.uk

Phorm in the UK

One business user was updating the website for his home business. He used his home network connection to inspect the appearance of his website. To his surprise, he could not understand why the format of his website was consistently different from what he had intended. Disturbed by this, he reinstalled the OS on all his servers in fear of being rootkitted, rechecked all his security settings, reconfigured his firewall, and performed a packet trace on every connection made. In the end he noticed that various links on his webpages were being changed and that in particular some were coming from dns.sysip.net. Basically, this system redirected any links to adverts back to Phorm servers.

Customer who was Phormed

I was reffering to the offers from Carphone Warehouse, Orange, SKY, NTL and a few others. They are usually free if you sign up to whatever other service they offer for the same price they used to charge for that on its own.

And how come you are still on 512K? I didn't think anyone sold those accounts anymore as even the crappy old BT network supports 1Meg ADSL. Try speaking to you ISP and they might give a you a free upgrade if you threaten to switch.

The reason it is so slow on Janet (UK Accademic Network) is because of all the other students downloading Pr0n

I'm using a Linksys ADSL2MUE which seems to fit the description of what you want.

Here's a review

Here's where I bought mine.

Hope that helps.

(judging by the lack of comments here, anyway)

There is useful information out there though, and it's usually in independant sites for users-of-all-of-the-manufacturers-of-product-x. To pick just one example, http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ is very concerned with the quality of the various offerings.

There's also the likes of http://blagger.com/ and http://www.clik2complaints.co.uk/ for seeing how often things have gone wrong for other people. All of these are UK examples, but surely there are national equivalents in most places?

OK. Here's a list for one of the 25 EU countries... http://www.adslguide.org.uk/isps/packagelist.asp

It's a few pages long...

I wish, for one second that libtards would THINK

I wish, for one second that libtards would THINK

In plusnet's explanation of the problem at http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=& Board=plusnet&Number=2600008 is a little sign that plusnet have not been quite as customer caring as they should be...

"... So, here we are, it is almost a month since the 700GB of email and mailing lists were lost and we still have no recovered data to return to you. This is of course upsetting for us, and even more so for the customers whose data has been affected. The longer we wait for the equipment to be returned to us the greater the risk we run of hitting other capacity issues that we know are ahead of us, and we do not feel that we can justify any longer a wait, and still be taking the appropriate action for our customers... "

If I had deleted 700 GB of customer email, I'd keep trying to recover it and buy replacement equipment to meet the capacity needs of the business. There shouldn't need to be a trade-off. Plusnet should keep trying to recover, and buy some more kit to look after their customers.

By 14:00 on that day the specialists were racking the NAS and began the process of copying all the 1's and 0's from our equipment to their own. This is standard operating procedure for anyone working in the field of data recovery, and is simply about ensuring that there is always an untouched copy of the information in case something further goes wrong while working on the recovery.

[..]the engineer who deleted the 3 volumes in the first place swiftly followed up his error by immediately trying to create a volume of the same size as the 1st of the volumes in the same place. This is an old sysadm "trick" that on some file systems could have revealed the lost data, however in this case, it did not work, and in fact caused us more problems[...]

According to this posting at ADSLGuide (which might be the text found at one of the links in the announcement linked to above), the initial problem was exacerbated by the technician trying to create a new volume of the same size as the one he had just deleted. This left a load of orphaned i-nodes on the second and third volumes. http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=& Board=plusnet&Number=2600008

Demon user discussions I've seen can be found at: http://groups.google.com/group/demon.service and http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Boar d=demon

Recently, we received notification that during the process of emailing customers about the announcements posted yesterday, whilst uploading the information to the email tool that we use, an error occurred and we sent the contact information of 20,000 people to approximately 3,500 customers.

Zen's customer support (home, not business) have been good to me. Their Web Portal's okay for managing your account and their phone support lines have knowledgeable and helpful staff. http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ have their users rate the Zen experience as faster and more reliable than any other service I could compare them to.

Prodigy Networks are the firm you are looking for. They have several good unmetered ADSL packages. Excellent reliability (I've been a client for 3 years and had 8 hours downtime) and English based customer service. Just call and ask for Nick, or sign up online.

It's wires only, so you will need your own filters and modem, but the prices and service are great.

HTH

ADSL Guide UK has some good recommendations.

Well, I'm a brit and I'll tell you what I think of the *current* state of play. Within the last 6 months (exactly when, I'm not sure) the "Last mile" from local exchanges to premises has been moved from BT into a subsiduary (OpenReach) under a similar scheme to the one proposed a little further up the thread.

The plan is that OpenReach provide all the technical elements of the phone and DSL systems put in place by BT, and are responsible for fault-finding and such like. They also own the exchanges, and are supposed (possibly required) to let other last-mile providers (LLU operators, such as Cable and Wireless) install their equipment in there as well to foster competition.

In addition to this, you also have a single cable provider (used to be two, but they merged) trying their damnest to shake the tree from the outside, and the mobile telecoms companies trying to shake it from the inside, and as a result, the prices are falling significantly.

Within the last month, two providers have actually stated that you can get broadband internet (through DSL) for free, provided you pay enough for other services with the same company.

So, as it currently stands, the state-sponsored telecom provider (which has been privately owned for at least a decade) is just another dog in the yard. A big one, due to their previous position, but being fed less than before to become leaner. They're also probably going to struggle, as they don't have any influences in either mobile telephony or television provision (BSkyB, or News International have bought an LLU provider, and the cable firm has its own infrastructure).

As food for thought, it is currently possible to get 8Mb/s (with unknown upstream or usage limits) for between £100 and £200 per year (US$180-360). http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ is showing 12 different providers (mostly LLU) willing to offer that service at that price.

I don't know quite why PC Doctor is getting so upset about this. I briefly checked out the Sky by Broadband info a week or two ago, and from a few minutes clicking around the linked site it was perfectly plain to me that it involved installing the Kontiki P2P app. Ok, they may not shout it from the front page, but they're not exactly hiding the fact, either.

Meanwhile UK ISPs are introducing download limits as low as a couple of gig per month, and charging for excessive usage.

For a lot of people in the UK, whether they use their landline, or a VoIP phone they are still paying money to BT one way or another. Either by traditional phone bills, or through their ISP who use the BT network. Not to mention you pay BT a chunk of money each month even if you don't make any calls at all. And with NTL getting stronger, it seems like BT's monopoly is under threat enough for it to avoid being broken up like AT&T in the US. Products that use the BT network wont scare BT as they could just provide a similar one. The threat will come from cable companies, who can tempt people away from BT completly

Better Yet, Read the Blog of their first customer Stefan.More info about Broadband in the UK is available here.

"The service activation is £24 and is offered via a shared LLU line, meaning your existing BT telephone line remains unaltered, but Be will unbundle the DSL part of the line to connect it to their own hardware at the exchange. The LLU element will mean the service is limited in availability to those exchanges where Be has installed its own kit. The maximum speeds quoted are actually the ATM speeds of the line, so maximum TCP/IP throughput on a perfect line would be around 21.5Mbps downstream and 1.1Mbps upstream. Also it is worth bearing in mind that ADSL2+ is very distance dependent, i.e. that speeds approaching the maximum are only likely on a line less than 1km long. If your line can manage 2Mbps under existing BT limits, then switching to ADSL2+ is likely to give a significant speed boost. For those only getting 1Mbps and 0.5Mbps, the biggest difference is likely to be the upstream speed."

Sounds like you need Zen. I've been with them for a year now. Excellent customer service, low contention, and high speeds at reasonable prices. see also http://www.adslguide.org.uk/

This 3km limit is a load of cobbliers. The vast majority of lines will work just fine out to 7-8km, and some much further.

Last year BT did a large in the field trial of "extended reach" ADSL. Basically they hooked any line, no matter what the distance to the DSLAM and let the customer hook up their modem and saw what happened.

In most cases it just worked, and in the cases where it did not work, a visit from an engineer to fit a ADSL filter at the NTE5 (the master socket in the house) and the vast majority started working. In the UK the official estimate from BT is that about 0.2% of all telephone lines will not work with a 512kbps ADSL connection.

The result of the trial is that if you order a 512kbps ADSL line they hook you up regardless. If it does not work you get an engineer visit, and if you are in the unlucky 0.2% you get a refund.

Any ADSL provider enforcing distance limits needs their head examining. The biggest problem by far with long lines not working is the mess of extensions in the house. Solution filter the ADSL signal off at the master socket. What could be simpler.

See the following URL's for more information.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/news.php?id=201
http://www.adslguide.org.uk/newsarchive.asp?item=1 814

Go to ADSLguide.

Most people I have spoken to agree that BT are a bit , well, bad at customer, or even ISP relations. I haven't heard that much about NTL, so I can't say anything about their level of service

Having said that, my experience with two different ISPs has been mostly good.

Zen Internet managed to get ADSL for one place setup in just a week. The advertised lead time was 12 days. A year later, an upgrade from 512kbit/s to 1Mbit/s. They informed us we would lose our connection for a short while, and told us when it would happen. It happened, but the new connection did not appear to have come online. A couple of technical support calls to some friendly and helpful operators who said the problem was (apparently) BT had been a bit slow changing the line, and they would take the matter up with BT immediately. The next day, we have a 1Mbit/s connection. There have been no real problems with the service, except for fires in some cable tunnels taking out half of the telephone lines in the area.

I have not had first hand experience dealing with Bulldog Broadband setup, but the existing service I get from them has been exemplary.

Both Bulldog and Zen provide service alerts on their respective sites, informing of any problems or upgrades, as well as emails to the account holder.

For those looking for a provider for broadband, I highly recommend these ISPs. If you feel like looking around a bit more, try ADSLguide and ISP Review to get the low-down on UK providers.

If you're interested in any of the deeper techie/political details that other users haven't mentioned, I can reccomend the ADSLGuide Q&A - the first few pages are newbie oriented but the later parts helped me alot when I was working out the quirks with various provider's services.

The other notable fact is the recent (as in last 6 months) change in how BT wholesale deal with ADSL provision - essentially it encourages resellers to offer much faster speeds (previously 512kbps was standard, now it's about 1-3mbps) but also encourages bandwidth caps.

As a result, you can now pay £29.99/month for capped 8mbps DSL (currently a very nice 500GB cap, but I don't trust that to last) or roughly the same for uncapped 2mbps with no port blocking or anything nasty like that. Personally I'm out of range for 8mbps, so that kinda made the decision for me, but many users are picking up on 1mbps for very little cash and then finding themselves subject to caps as low as 5GB with various nasty locks on what you can and can't do on the network, and that's roughly the same for cable AFAIK.

To summarise: we have fast, affordable broadband with crap service and crap TOS or we have to pay disproportionately for quality service. And God forbid you want anything not specified by BT Wholesale, you'll be paying 10x over the odds for that.

41% of British Internet connections are broadband or other always-on connections, and 4% use a mixture of access methods. Leaves 55% who are exclusively modem users.

Oh, and a list of places without ADSL:

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/availability/btprereg. asp?order=trig

I have read reports like UK ADSL forum of certain ports still left *open* as it appears it breaks windows netwroking on sub-nets.

What a surprise.

There's also Telewest, for people in the Telewest cable franchise areas, and a whole host of other ADSL providers that use infrastucture that was formally BT's, and the last mile of phone cable that BT has to offer tham a good deal on reselling.

Although someone said we get shafted on transfer speeds compared to America (which is somewhat true), none of our decent ADSL resellers implement monthly data transfer caps. I'd far rather have a 512k/256k ADSL service with unlimited transfer and no worrying about going over the limit than a 2mbit service with a measly 10 gigs per month.

I personally go with Zen Internet, who are a damn reliable ISP and give me 512k/256k ADSL for around 25GBP per month.

I'd specifically recomment *against* going with BTopenworld... they incorrectly closed my account, and then had the audacity to charge me an early account closure fee, because of the fact that they have a ludicrous 12 month minimum term contract for their ADSL service, where nearly every other ADSL provider has 1 month minimum term. It was settled with them paying 300GBP to me in compensation. I've also heard other nasties about BTopenworld, ie. they might be implementing monthly data caps (yuk!) and blocking ports. Americans might be used to this kind of BS from their monopolistic cable companies, but that doesn't mean it's something people should have to put up with.

Listings and reviews of other BT ADSL providers can be found at ADSLguide.

This _should_ mean that the UK is insanely chep for this kind of infrastructure, at least in England. Major cities are very close compared to in the US. There probably aren't many pipes longer than 30/40 miles in middle-south England, and even Scotland has nowhere near the USAian distances. It doesn't seem to make any difference though. True, there are few places without mobile phone reception, but there's still plenty of villages without DSL - see ADSL guide for some stats. The prices are high too, BT own most of the pipes and ISPs pay loads (50 at least) to activate a connection to BT. The bigger one's have a "free" activation fee, but you'll pay GBP26-29 a month for 512-256, smaller local ISPs will pass on the activation fee and charge between 17 and 27 or so. I can't wait for an increase in the download speed though... pity the poor souls on dial-up

Upgrading ALL the 3000 exchanges without broadband. FUCK the demand system. Subsidise the smaller exchanges with the bigger ones. My relatives in somerset CAN'T get it because BT is a fucking incubent monolith that needs to fucking DIE!

for some people this may have began already.. many large warez ftps have already moved to accepting ipv6 connections only, however for many people this will require over use (even abuse) of free ipv6 tunnel brokers and doesnt provide stong grounds to presure isp's to bring native support.

There is one dsl isp in the uk (commercialy orientated) called Andrews & Arnold which offer ipv6 an IPv4 gatewat with their adsl.

there is still a good few legitimate uses of ipv6 however it will definatly take a few years to become widespear. seamless roaming with native ipv6 support in a mobile phone would be nice.. and with pprovider support i belive it could be easily implineted on todays gsm/gprs phones such as sony/ericson p800.

Fair enough, that makes sense I guess, it's just I'm used to getting pretty much 100% of the theoretical speed. I must be lucky :)

For anyone in the UK who doesn't already know about it, this site offers rankings and comparisions of all the different DSL providers. I don't know of any similar sites for cable, I guess direct comparisons are less useful as there are only 2 suppliers (AFAIK). But knowing how fast an average NTL 1mbps line actually is could be useful for folks.

Just to nitpick; as ADSLGuide.org.uk makes clear, UK DSL is 512k down, 256k up for the home service (theoretical 50:1 contention, although I've never seen it here on a DSL line in Durham). Business services are 512k, 1M or 2M down, 256k up, at a theoretical 20:1 contention. They did trial ADSL services with higher uplinks, but never released them.

Hey,

Cable services seem to be as much of a monopoly in UK as they are here in US (no DSL is rarely viable here, dunno about UK). So what is stopping them from this? NOTHING. So the customers get pissed and set up websites... but how many are going to pack up and move? None.

They could change to ADSL. British Telecom (who own most of the country's telephone wires) were told by the government that they had to sell connections wholesale... meaning you connect to your ISP through BT's network, but you can choose from a very wide range of ISPs to link you up to the 'actual' internet. So there's lots of competition.

If you want to connect multiple computers, use VPN, or have multiple IPs, you can. If you have the cash, you can get as fast as 8Mbps, but 512kbps is the normal connection speed.

Which, needless to say, it great.

Yay for market forces and, uh, government intervention as well.

Michael

Hey,

Cable services seem to be as much of a monopoly in UK as they are here in US (no DSL is rarely viable here, dunno about UK). So what is stopping them from this? NOTHING. So the customers get pissed and set up websites... but how many are going to pack up and move? None.

They could change to ADSL. British Telecom (who own most of the country's telephone wires) were told by the government that they had to sell connections wholesale... meaning you connect to your ISP through BT's network, but you can choose from a very wide range of ISPs to link you up to the 'actual' internet. So there's lots of competition.

If you want to connect multiple computers, use VPN, or have multiple IPs, you can. If you have the cash, you can get as fast as 8Mbps, but 512kbps is the normal connection speed.

Which, needless to say, it great.

Yay for market forces and, uh, government intervention as well.

Michael

I use Eclipse Internet for ADSL here in the U.K.

Around GBP 25/month buys me a connection to the second fastest ADSL provider in the country.

There is no fixed term contract (I pay month by month), no traffic restrictions, no closed ports and very little downtime. Static IP addresses are standard and more are easy to obtain. In addition, all the usual webspace, mail and news stuff are included in the standard price.

I share the 512kb/s uplink with the three people I live with and two of our neighbours via a 802.11b. Between us we have a number of servers running so pretty much max out our bandwidth all of the time.

I suggest that anyone considering a switch from NTL consider them.

The general consensus is that Nildram and Pipex are probably currently the two best ADSL ISPs in the UK - Nildram are offering 22.99 pounds a month at the moment.

My ISP is Pipex (I'm in the UK) and from time to time even their Managing Director takes part in the forums on ADSLGuide.co.uk.

I like to see this sort of interaction from an ISP, and it's one of the reasons I'm with them.

.....oh, alright then, I'm with them because they're cheap ;)

But it's nice to see a large ISP with a healthy attitude towards their customers.

If the packet size is less than 1458 then Cisco Express Forwarding is used to forward the packet to its destination, whilst above 1458 the hardware will inspect the packet, make a number of descsions and then forwarded it.

FAIRADSL, one of the cheap adsl providers, has also put restrictions on p2p. Well you can always pay more to STEAL!

Best place to check out what is happening in the UK for ADSL and to talk about the different providers is at www.adslguide.org.uk

Availability is less than stellar, but it's getting better.

NB: UK users should check ADSLGuide for info on ADSL in the UK.

Latest quote (after they had admitted before to port throttling) to customer enquiring if pcAnywhere ports were disabled / throttled: "Erm, we believe that they are not throttled".
They daren't admit it or they'd get hit with litigation, but do it all the same and lose you in the system and charge you £40 a month for the privilege.

I'm assuming you're talking about my howto (LinuxDude).

I'm sorry if the HOWTO wasn't able to help you, I do my best despite having next to zero free time. I get quite a lot of mail about the HOWTO and I try to answer as much as I can, but as much as I'd like to I just don't have time to walk everyone through the setup (which is stupidly complex unfortunately).

In your case it seems that things are working now, but for anyone else that is having problems, I strongly suggest you drop by the Linux forum of ADSLGuide, there are plenty of people there who have the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB ADSL modem working and there should be enough eyeballs looking at your questions to make them trivial.

For anyone who is annoyed with the deficiencies of my HOWTO, if you can improve it, feel free. The SGML source is available on the LinuxDude site at the URL I posted above, I will graciously accept patches. If you can send me a patch (or at least the corrected/improved text as ASCII) I should be able to get the thing converted and uploaded within a few hours.

There's a company here the UK, recently launched, called Homechoice that does VoD, based on BT's ADSL network. According to their FAQ, "[y]ou can pause, rewind, or fast forward it and even watch it as many times as you want over your 24-hour rental period."

A friend of mine has it - apparently one month they got their on-demand charges to over £100 because of the sheer convenience of clicking a button to get a movie they (more or less) wanted to watched streamed to them instantly.

The biggest problem with HomeChoice, from what I hear, is their range of content. And this comes down to business issues, rather than technical. I believe a lot of the TV channels they have show older re-runs than you would expect to get on a normal cable/satellite/digital terrestrial service.

No idea what HomeChoice's back-end looks like. I pressume the infrastructure costs have come down significantly since the Time-Warner (?) trials in Florida in the early '90s - the trials that get quoted so often as to how VoD will never catch on (and I guess that's the what Wired was talking about in the above comment).

Homechoice also does a bearable always-on 'net connection, although with some pretty significant limitations (128k, NAT, etc) - but I imagine it's quite attractive to your ma-and-pa style home users. ADSL Guide probably talks about their net services. You'll probably have to dig around their message forums to find some users of the service.

As far as Blockbuster goes, I thought I read something recently about them doing a JV in the UK to provide VoD-style services. Can't find a link to that story, but here's something about them doing a JV with DirecTV in the States. Blockbuster thinks, probably correctly, that their brand is worth something in the PPV/VoD market.