Archive for the 'wireless' Category

NTL broadband - a pleasant surprise

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

We moved house recently and this prompted me to investigate an alternative to my existing broadband supplier (Eircom). I rang NTL last week had a pleasant conversation with with an Irish sales guy who gently persuaded me to ugrade to NTL digital to boot (ok, I was kind of planning to at some point so he caught me in a softened up state).

The NTL man arrived on Tuesday and with a bit of tinkering on my part I had broadband connected all over the house  via wireless by 6.00pm. Its the standard package  (3mb download, €30 a month) and according to the Irish ISPtest its about the same speed as my €45 a month Eircom package.

Two nice touches,

  • They texted me to remind me that the guy was coming the day before he was due to arrive.
  • I had a problem when I first connected so I followed the instructions taped to the top of the cable modem (power off PC, power off modem, turn on modem wait 30 secs, turn on PC) for a laugh, and hey presto it worked!

Good job NTL…

Posted in Business, NTL, broadband, dublin, ireland, irishblogs, wireless | 6 Comments »

Rubbish WIFI at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Dublin

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

I bought (an extortionate) €7 WIFI card at the Crowne Plaza Hotel today, only to discover once I logged in that their WIFI firewall blocks access to POP and SMTP. So, its impossible to send an email or recieve one without logging into a web client.

As Basil Fawlty would say “What is the point of bleedin’ WIFI if you can’t get to your email“.
I left a complaint with desk, but I doubt it will make past front desk to anybody who can do anything about it…

Posted in Software, Vendors, WIFI, wireless | 1 Comment »

Reflash your FON Router

Saturday, April 22nd, 2006

I won a free wireless router at the Irish Blog Awards a few weeks ago. Its a Linksys WRT54GL, but came with FON software pre-installed. I have nothing against FON and their aims but I found the software hard to use and configure. So this week I reflashed the router with the original Linksys software.

This is a straightforward process. First connect the router to a PC via a bit of ethernet cable. Now boot the router and login via http://192.168.0.1 (it might have been http://192.168.1.1). Go to the system table and look for the upgrade dialog. This upgrade dialog allows you to select a local file to upgrade the router. You can download the Linksys firmware from the linksys website. So download that file and feed it to the upgrade dialog.

The upgrade screen will print out some messages about unpacking the file and once it prints done you have completed the upload. The final step is to press the button on the front of the router to reboot the system. The light behind this button will flash furiously for a few minutes and when it settles down you have a fully configured and working original Linksys router.

Full docs are again available on the Linksys page.

Posted in Hardware, Software, fon, linksys, networks, wireless | 22 Comments »