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Many thanks for that info, it's something I've been looking for for a looong time.

BTW, I went to your web site and got the following error:

Warning: main(./pm/inc.sfx.inc): failed to open stream:

I am particularly interested in your site as I am doing some work with wireless and Ubuntu Linux.

What that page would tell you is that I sell 54 Mbps, 802.11g wireless network cards featuring the Ralink 2500 and the prism54 chipsets, which are both VERY well supported with open-source drivers under Linux.

The Ralink 2500 cards are £29 + p&p, available in PCI & cardbus versions and are supported by the rt2500 driver (which is now shipped by many distros, including Ubuntu).
The prism54 wireless cards are £39 + p&p and available in PCI only but as well as operating as a normal wireless network card they'll also do "master mode". This allows a regular Linux PC to operate as a wireless base-station - not ad-hoc mode, but proper master-mode, FWIW. The prism54 driver has been part of the main 2.6 kernel tree for some time.

I'm based in the UK but can ship within the EU. Email me for more details.

Ned.

...all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers)..

Whilst all the lines are owned by BT, when they were privatised by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s they were put under the supervision of OFTEL (now OFCOM, I think) which was given the job of ensuring that BT doesn't behave in a monopolistic manner. For this reason BT have to provide lines to ISPs on reasonable terms - in fact BT's wholesale division are required to treat other ISPs on equal terms with BT Retail (and sometimes maybe they even do!) - and ISPs are allowed to resell services through BT's lines on whatever terms they wish. BT may have the right to charge ISPs usage fees for using their backbone network (between the exchange and the ISP's offices), but since Local Loop Unbunding ("LLU") ISPs are no longer required to use BT's backbone, so cost may not be prohibitive, either.

FWIW I use Eclipse (referrer link) for my ADSL. I find them to be very good indeed and those of my customers who have followed my advice (all too few, alas!) have been pleased with them, too.

• I pay £29.99 for Eclipse's most premium home service. I get 3.5meg down out of MaxDSL & 445k or whatever up.
• I believe this to be a truly unlimited service, but don't know for sure. I surely hit the 50gig per month that the OP mentions, but maybe not 100gig.
• If I have technical support problems, Eclipse are brilliant. Their staff are based in Exeter, I believe. My line started giving problems on a Sunday, I called them on a Monday morning and as soon as the girl took my user login she told me she could see that the line was dropping every few minutes, that it was surely a line problem and that she'd escalate to BT wholesale. 2 hours later I got a call to arrange the engineer's visit (it actually took 2 engineers' visits to resolve the problem, as the first one disconnected the ringers of the telephones on my extension lines, but I'm getting used to that). Contrast this with the typical phonecall to BT's or Tiscali's tech support, where the call-handlers barely speak English and always ask you to reinstall the modem drivers. In fact, before now I've had to pretend to reinstall the modem drivers in order to get the PPPoA username & password to install a router, because the call handler didn't understand me when I asked for them (in however many different ways!) but was capable of reciting her script to the point where she could tell me "now type in user123@hg54.btinternet.com and fidothedog1".
• Eclipse technical support managed to talk Mary, the 30-something, god-squad single-mother of 3, how to set up her own choice of email address through their web-based interface, AND THEN how to access it with Outlook Express. They must truly be saints, and deserve your business.

Ned.

As identity0 pointed out in an adjacent post, Ralink released their own drivers for this chipset under the GPL, although I believe this has been thoroughly re-worked for the current community releases. This driver is shipped by a lot of distros now, and cards using it will probably be detected at install time by Suse, Ubuntu, Mandrake & Fedora Core. I find it very stable.

Ned.

Whilst Ralink & prism54 cards work great under Linux, the madwifi drivers for Atheros are not bad at all. They are under really heavy development at the moment, so I do expect some glitches - I found that one version of the CVS snapshot worked perfectly for me, whilst the next week's failed completely - but madwifi has some killer features which are quite a bonus if you can use them. I guess it's the open-drivers & these features that made PC Engines choose atheros cards as standard options for their embedded PC boards which they pitch as a "Wireless Router Application Platform".

Specifically with madwifi-ng you can use an Atheros card in master mode, have your PC as a base-station, and you can have multiple virtual access-points (VAPs), each assigned a different interface. Thus you can have trusted clients connecting via WEP to one VAP and allow open-access for unencrypted access to another VAP (using a single wireless card), but firewall the second VAP using iptables so that clients using it can only access the internet and not the LAN. Finally, madwifi also supports 802.11a as well as b&g with appropriate hardware (and there are a few cards out there that do a/b/g); I guess that not many people need this feature, but I can see it would be useful if there's a lot of b/g/cordless-phone interference in your area &/or if you just want a point-to-point link for connecting two office LANs and you'd prefer it to be a little off the radar.

Ralink's rt2500 might be a better chipset for someone who is coming from Windows and who just wants to install Ubuntu, but I wish I could get more of the Atheros cards (at the right price). If you're prepared to compile your own drivers & tinker a little bit to get it working then Atheros is surely the best wireless chipset for Linux available right now.

Ned.

There seems to be good information on wireless cards at http://networkned.co.uk/hardware.php, which references the FSF list https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/card s.html.

I believe that I applied for an exemption for this term when I originally set up the ad with AdWords, but it's been running for months quite happily without bothering anyone.

When I Google for "enterprise-level" I (of course) get loads of hits discussing enterprise-ready email, whether Linux is enterprise-ready, firewalls & stuff, but I see the only advertiser is Enterprise Rent-A-Car UK. That makes me extremely tempted to trademark the term in the context of ADSL modems & then file a complaint about the Ford-pimping bastards. At least that way I might get a dialogue going with Google - as it is I confidently expect any complaints or protests about the matter to be ignored or get auto-responses; if I create a new advert with the words it gets suspended within half an hour.

If there's anyone reading this who works at Google then I'd be extremely grateful if you could have a little word with your censorship department for me, or give me a direct email address for them. Having an advert claiming "Outstanding Linux-support" simply doesn't satisfy me the way "Enterprise-level Linux support" does. And hey! Linux is a trademark, so I guess they'll be censoring that next week!!

Thank you for ignoring this rant. Please moderate it "funny" because i surely won't be so miffed at Google next week.

My wireless card wasn't detected. Doesn't matter what distro, it doesn't work out of the box - I need ndiswrapper and custom setup. Not bitching about that, but Ubuntu didn't magically make it happen.

I guess we've gotten used to the majority of soundcards & wired Ethernet cards working out of the box, but wireless - like current graphics cards - is another matter. It's really hard to reverse-engineer drivers when the manufacturer won't even talk to you.

Ralink have GPL'd the drivers they wrote for their RT2x00 chipset & released documentation to OpenBSD, resulting in very active community support for these cards. The drivers weren't in Ubuntu last time I checked (I suspect they'll be in this release) but I do know that Mandrake (10.2 & Limited Edition) recognises Ralink wireless cards out of the box.

DISCLOSURE: I'm employed by the vendor linked to in this comment.