Router Hooter

> the standard of their customer services & installations is
> universally regarded as abysmal

Had BY installed 3 times (separate places) in the last 2 years. All was good - had to wait a bit longer than appointment time but i was prepared to do that for nice juice fast access for cheap price - when I joined BY I was routinely paying BT around £100 per month for limited offpeak crappy 56k connection - long live Telewest!

I made it abundantly clear that I wouldn't let a telewest "cable" engineer anywhere near any of my PCs. I gave him a mac number to register.

They are not qualified or competent in PC, setup, maintenance, or fault resolution, and probably would not know how to resolve a problem if they made a mistake.

What the idiot looked at had absolutely nothing to do with confirming the validity of the system.

They won't even answer my request to register my domain with their smtp server - I'm broadcasting SMTP at the moment (not relaying), but I would prefer to relay via their SMTP service for security reasons.

RobAnt

Only if the BY installer is willing to register your routers Mac address instead of (or as well as) the Nic. (Or whichever way he did it for you).
The guy who did mine was 1) basically a cretin, and 2) the most unhelpful, uncooperative git I have ever encountered. When I mentioned I'd be setting up a router, and could he get the Mac added along with the Nic, he looked at me as if I'd offered to impregnate his wife.
When he failed to turn up for the 3rd time, having failed to leave me with a working cable modem, I was almost relieved.
You seem to have been lucky - the standard of their customer services & installations is universally regarded as abysmal, fortunately the service works pretty well once installed, so you don't have to encounter them on a regular basis.

Edit - I meant 2 ways round all the de-config & re-config etc. you mentioned.

That's a total of 3 ways, then.

Re Mac addresses of PCs & Routers etc. on Telewest.

2 ways round this - you can register up to 5 Mac addresses on 1 account. You can do it yourself online using the self-care facility.
Alternatively most routers will "spoof" a different Mac address - just use your PCs Mac and you're away.

And I'm using the D-link kit. Limited to 22mbps on the laptop - but that doesn't matter so much to me really.

DWL-650+ PC Card & DI-614+ Router.

Probably not the very best - but excellent value for money (got them as a bundle). Been running for two months and once I'd installed the firmware updates, no trouble.

Cable and wireless connections are on the same LAN, so no complicated jack & danny'ing about with ip subnets etc. Don't know if that's normal with wireless routers, but I expect it is.

Webpage configuration of router.

Incidentally, I bullied the Telewest engineer who installed the Terminal Adapter (I flatly refuse to call these things modems) into registering the router's MAC address, rather than a PCs. It has saved hours configuring, de-configuring & re-configuring, etc. He just had to look at an IP parameter on my PC, but I don't think he had a clue what he was looking at, frankly. I surfed the web - he saw it working - end of story.

They're a bit slow when it comes to adding my domain name to their mailservers list of allowed rcpthosts, though. It's not absolutely necessary, of course, but it would be slightly more reliable to relay my outgoing email via their SMTP server.

I'm using the Linksys Wireless-G broadband router with Telewest / BY and it works a treat.
About £70+ vat, includes a 4 port hub as well.

reynolds,

Have a look at www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk

They should have something.

Or... We can supply a brand new (with 1 year warranty) Origo 22Mbps ASDL Router for £89.99.

Anyone know of a wireless router that is compatible with Telewest? What kind of kit do I need?