BT Total Broadband

Post by **Dangerous Bob** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 2:53 pm

OK so all the bits arrived.

In the box you get;

Home Hub & Power adapter
Disc
2 filters
Cables, BB, Telephone converter, USB, & an Ethernet cable.

No Phone as they're out of stock, but there's enough to keep me happy here.

Plugged in the 2 wireless cards I bought from Dabs (54Mb dabsvalue<a href="http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?quicklinx=3119" target="_blank">(Edimax)</a>ones at Â£12 each, note that the pic shown on the link is not the card, the own supplied has a wandering aerial which is useful.).
Didn't expect them to pick up anything, but it seems that someone in my street has an unsecured network. Useful if I lose mine then......

Plugged in my Hub to the BB, and powered it up. Lots of flashing lights, and the instructions say to leave it for an hour while everything settles down, before connecting the PC's to the Hub.
After an hour, I push the CD into the drawer and it loads up the hub software etc. including a load of unwanted rubbish such as telephine software, Yahoo messnger, browser etc.
So I spend the next hour uninstalling the unwanted bits. (pity that BT don't allow you to pick the bits to install.) I also activated the phone side of things, because even though I dont have the BB phone, I can plug a normal phone into the hub and use that instead.
Next I needed to setup the network, putting in the WEP thingy so I used my own network rather than my neighbours. No problems there.

Then I run the BT speed test and download a few things to check what speed I'm actually getting.
Am extremely disappointed to get a reading of about 0.6MB/s, Wasn't that just above normal ADSL Speed?
So I download BF1942 and am delighted to see a figure of 600 odd KBps on the download proggy where it was only 150 odd before.
So the lightbulb goes on as I remember that KBps and kbps are totally different.
Running the download this morning I get 750 KBps which is equivalent to just over 5.8 Mbps, not bad as they reckon my top speed is only going to be about 6ish anyway.

The other problem I had was with online gaming. BF2 seemed to play OK, but AAO was coming up with wierd freezes and lags.
BT have warned that there might be the odd lag and freeze as the line settles down, but I've plugged my gaming PC in via the ethernet connection just to help, in case the wireless is causing the lag. After all I'm not exactly using a state of the art wireless card.

Playing with the Hub Manager is the next thing, and also figuring out how to set the network up so I can see shared folders between the PC's etc. Should be easy enough providing I can get the firewalls to play nice.

Any other hints I ought to be thinking about for wireless networks?

Post by **Bronco** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 5:19 pm

Dangerous Bob wrote: The other problem I had was with online gaming. BF2 seemed to play OK, but AAO was coming up with wierd freezes and lags.

Bob , Everybody seems to be moaning about lag and freezes with AAO, seems to be the net code and probably not your end.

You might want to change the wifi channel in the hub settings to 12, for some reason it seems to increase the signal strengh.

Post by **Stocky** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 6:54 pm

As I said over Ts the other night, you'll get a lot of inconsistent d/l speeds over the next 4-10 days as they set the profile for your line. The download speeds will also be erratic between peak times, 4 - 11pm, but this has never been a problem to me as I game during these hours & ping isn't effected. [/quote]

Only ever tried gaming via wireless once, ran like a pig so went back to wired.

Post by **Dangerous Bob** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 7:08 pm

wifi channel in hub settings to 12..........

OK.....

/reaches for manual.

Whats the USB port on the hub for anyone know?

Post by **Stocky** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 7:20 pm

Dangerous Bob wrote:
Whats the USB port on the hub for anyone know?

It's to use it as a single modem for single PC, instead of going Ethernet cable, you would connect it direct to your PC via usb cable, not recommended for 8MB ADSL.

Post by **Dangerous Bob** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 8:22 pm

Cheers guys.

Next question.

I enabled the wireless conn and left the ethernewt cable in. Hubs designated one as IP 192.168.1.64, the other as 192.168.1.65.

Both seem to be working fine, but which one is being used for the internet conn?
Looking at the workgroup computers, it's only seeing the two on the MShome network.

Post by **Stocky** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 9:08 pm

Dangerous Bob wrote: Cheers guys.

Next question.

I enabled the wireless conn and left the ethernewt cable in. Hubs designated one as IP 192.168.1.64, the other as 192.168.1.65.

Both seem to be working fine, but which one is being used for the internet conn?
Looking at the workgroup computers, it's only seeing the two on the MShome network.

lol, I did post a reply to this but gave up, are you saying you have enabled wireless & cable connection for 1 pc?? If so, then how bizarre?

Post by **Dangerous Bob** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 10:21 pm

yes