Broadband

After a long wait, Broadband has arrived in the local villages, whilst the Croft wireless broadband system has been operating for a while and is excellent for normal internet use, it is useless for online gaming, because of the time delay caused by the distance to the satellite.

Rumours of broadband coming to the village began to circulate just before Xmas 2003.

• Hurworth School has broadband

• BT have been laying optical cable

• BT have finally set a trigger level for the exchange to be enabled

• BT have committed to bringing broadband to the whole of the North East

This graph shows how demand was slowly increasing before the trigger level announcement at the beginning of December 2003. As soon as the trigger level was set, word quickly spread, register now, register every phone line in the house. By January 2004, the trigger level of 450 was reached and true to their word BT began preparations to upgrade the Croft exchange.

As shown on chart, there was a firm announcement of a completion date June 25th, 2004 as early as May. The beginning of June saw the first external signs of activity, when BT engineers dug up the phone cable running to the exchange box on the corner of Avon Road.

Having pre-ordered our upgrade to Broadband and been assured that our existing ISDN set up wasn't going to be a problem, we settled back to wait for an email telling us when the BT engineer would be calling to change the sockets. As soon as the email arrived, I ordered our wireless router. Both the engineer (nice chap called Chris Page) and the router arrived on schedule. The conversion went smoothly, a little more than the 15 mins widely quoted, but a lot less than the 4 hours we were advised due to the ISDN conversion.

So now we have broadband and its great, everything that we expected of it. Some people have asked us about service providers, you don't have to go with BTYahoo or whatever their name is this week. Wanadoo formerly Freeserve are very good, AOL and Tiscali are very poor (IMHO) both are examples of the power of advertising over technical performance. There are also many resellers of the BT package, such as Plusnet, Zen, Nildram, to name a few.

We chose the Demon Express solo service largely because we have been with Demon for a long time and have been impressed with the reliability of their service and we recommend them to our clients. One big advantage being that you get a fixed IP address whereas BT Business charge extra for this feature. A fixed IP address is essential for remote access using VPN (virtual private networking) or VNC type software to be able to access the office network from home and of course useful for online gaming.

You can read independent reviews of broadband and service providers at ADSL Guide

One last thing, now you have broadband you ABSOLUTELY must have

• a firewall such as zonealarm, the basic version is excellent and free for home use.
  Try to get version 4.5 rather than the latest version 5 series.

• anti-virus software, AVG is excellent and again free for home use

• anti spyware, SpybotS&D and Ad-aware (free version) are the best, use them both together, they complement each other. Although free to use, a donation would be appreciated by the authors.

There are other firewall and anti-virus programmes available, a google search will throw up dozens of entries. These are what we like for home use.

Think you might have a virus, get a free online scan from Trendmicro.

What about Norton internet security or Norton Anti-virus, I hear you ask or McAffee. Well these are both further examples of marketing over techical performance. We liked Peter Norton, his stuff was always technically superb, then he sold out...
Norton software became available from PC World... Nuff said!

Need a second opinion visit computer gripes.

p.s. As a business we quite like Norton, we make money putting it right, fixing its stupid activation, non functioning liveupdate and ripping it out completely, including the 10,000 entries it puts in the windows registry.