On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 15:24 +0100, Ed wrote: > Hi, this is no doubt a hardy perennial but here goes anyway: > > I need to sort out broadband in my flat. My criteria for deciding on an > ISP would be - in order: > > 1) Ease of setup (have got an Ubuntu (only) laptop). > 2) Cost > 3) Speed Ease of setup will depend on the hardware you get - if you go with an ADSL ISP, you may have to pay extra for an ethernet ADSL router, but as long as whatever hardware you get is ethernet, you shouldn't have any problems. Cable providers almost always provide ethernet routers (blueyonder do), so cable++ Cost I'm not really an expert on, so I'll skip that one.. Speed has to go to blueyonder as the clear winner - I pay £35 a month for my 10mbit cable connection, and I get some truly lovely bandwidth to sites in the UK and with good peering/transit in Europe. > As it's a laptop would be good to use a wireless router (i guess?) to > connect through, so I can use it in different rooms(?) This'll be a case of pick-your-favourite-vendor. My 2c is usually avoid (linksys,dlink,smc,netgear,etc) and go with either draytek (preferably) or 3com (almost as good). > Any ideas on hardware (same criteria as above) would be appreciated too. I use a blueyonder cable connection, I have a dell optiplex sitting behind it acting as a dedicated firewall (I'd recommend IPCop - www.ipcop.org for this), and I have a 3com 3CRWE-somethingorother wireless access point sitting behind that. You could quite happily replace all of that with one device, however - I've used the equivalent 3com ADSL router before (http://www.adslguide.org.uk/hardware/reviews/2004/q4/3com-g72.asp), and it works extremely well - I have no doubt the equivalent ethernet/cable version (if you went with a cable connection) is just as good. I know several people with equivalent draytek units too, and they're all very happy with them - some of the draytek have some snazzy features like built in USB printer sharing and VoIP support too. Hope that helps! - James. -- James (njan) Eaton-Lee | 10807960 | http://www.jeremiad.org Semper Monemus Sed Non Audiunt, Ergo Lartus - (Jean-Croix) sites: https://www.bsrf.org.uk ~ http://www.security-forums.com ca: https://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3
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