You *think* you are getting ADSL installed:) When "June" becomes "late summer" which in turn becomes "October/November", and when you pay 40GBP per month for USB ADSL modem which is already NATed and has dubious support for sharing, games, servers etc. then "a little overpriced" is a phrase worthy of BT's marketing dept.
Screaming/WorldOnline does have dreadful customer service it is true. However, there are no strings as you imply - you just pay your monthly charge, which for the offpeak service is less than BT, and for the 24/7 is more (about 5GBP per month).
You must pay your bill my credit card OR by direct debit.
The 3 hour disconnect is annoying, but only 66% as annoying as the old 2 hour disconnect:)
SurfTime is actually a pretty good idea - in that it diverts IP traffic out of voice switched circuits as soon as possible i.e. at the local exchange. The customer's exchange has to be surftime-enabled, meaning that it has a bank of modems that connect directly to BT's IP over ATM network thus freeing up all those trunk routes that would otherwise be used routing the call via PSTN to wherever the ISP's modems are. Instead the modems are as close to the customer as possible, and BT provide a PPP stream to the ISP using their Colossus network. The ISP then routes these streams to their peers using their own fat pipes (which may or may not be BT bandwidth).
Authorisation is performed at two levels: the line used to dial into SurfTime must be registered as such and provide CLI; and BT authorise the ISP account info when setting up the PPP session on behalf of the ISP.
As usual with BT, the technical support is dire! I had to work all this out pretty much by myself whilst struggling for 3 days to get a Cisco Dial on Demand ISDN router to use SurfTime. The secret (no pun intended) turned out to be to use CHAP and not PAP authorisation, but of course BT's phone-monkeys kept telling me to call my ISP (who of course have no access to the BT modems at my local exchange, and were as in the dark as I was).
The thing works great now - PAT on the Cisco allowing a LAN to have 24/7 unmetered access, and 128k multilink too for the same price. Multilink is still flakey, but I just haven't worked up the energy for another round of phone ping-pong yet:)
Or try a different telco like WorldOnline. I had free off-peak access for a year, for less than BT's standing charge. This has now become 24/7, for slightly more than BT's standing charge - about 5GBP per month I think.
"Usually I've found that the few times I've been unable to use an SMTP host outside of my ISP, it's been because that host is doing the smart thing and not allowing relaying."
Relaying isn't always what ppl are trying to do when connecting to other SMTP servers. They may be running SMTP themselves, and trying to deliver their mail direct to the recipients (using the MX records in DNS). This is of course what your ISP's SMTP server does. However, due to the ease of spamming via this method, either the receiving SMTP blacklists incoming connections from IP addys in known DHCP/RADIUS pools, and/or your ISP forces you to use their SMTP server by blocking your use of port 25 out of their network.
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You *think* you are getting ADSL installed :)
When "June" becomes "late summer" which in turn becomes "October/November", and when you pay 40GBP per month for USB ADSL modem which is already NATed and has dubious support for sharing, games, servers etc. then "a little overpriced" is a phrase worthy of BT's marketing dept.
Screaming/WorldOnline does have dreadful customer service it is true. However, there are no strings as you imply - you just pay your monthly charge, which for the offpeak service is less than BT, and for the 24/7 is more (about 5GBP per month). :)
You must pay your bill my credit card OR by direct debit.
The 3 hour disconnect is annoying, but only 66% as annoying as the old 2 hour disconnect
SurfTime is actually a pretty good idea - in that it diverts IP traffic out of voice switched circuits as soon as possible i.e. at the local exchange. The customer's exchange has to be surftime-enabled, meaning that it has a bank of modems that connect directly to BT's IP over ATM network thus freeing up all those trunk routes that would otherwise be used routing the call via PSTN to wherever the ISP's modems are. Instead the modems are as close to the customer as possible, and BT provide a PPP stream to the ISP using their Colossus network. The ISP then routes these streams to their peers using their own fat pipes (which may or may not be BT bandwidth). Authorisation is performed at two levels: the line used to dial into SurfTime must be registered as such and provide CLI; and BT authorise the ISP account info when setting up the PPP session on behalf of the ISP. As usual with BT, the technical support is dire! I had to work all this out pretty much by myself whilst struggling for 3 days to get a Cisco Dial on Demand ISDN router to use SurfTime. The secret (no pun intended) turned out to be to use CHAP and not PAP authorisation, but of course BT's phone-monkeys kept telling me to call my ISP (who of course have no access to the BT modems at my local exchange, and were as in the dark as I was). The thing works great now - PAT on the Cisco allowing a LAN to have 24/7 unmetered access, and 128k multilink too for the same price. Multilink is still flakey, but I just haven't worked up the energy for another round of phone ping-pong yet :)
Or try a different telco like WorldOnline. I had free off-peak access for a year, for less than BT's standing charge. This has now become 24/7, for slightly more than BT's standing charge - about 5GBP per month I think.
How about PostScript? Although the input and interactive features of most laser printers may prove to be a small handicap...
"Usually I've found that the few times I've been unable to use an SMTP host outside of my ISP, it's been because that host is doing the smart thing and not allowing relaying." Relaying isn't always what ppl are trying to do when connecting to other SMTP servers. They may be running SMTP themselves, and trying to deliver their mail direct to the recipients (using the MX records in DNS). This is of course what your ISP's SMTP server does. However, due to the ease of spamming via this method, either the receiving SMTP blacklists incoming connections from IP addys in known DHCP/RADIUS pools, and/or your ISP forces you to use their SMTP server by blocking your use of port 25 out of their network.