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The Expatriate

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 7, 2004
14
0
My local exchange was recently upgraded from the dark ages and now supports ADSL and I want to get in on all the action. My question for you though is who do I sign up with and what equipment do I buy?

I don't seem to recognise any of the names (except BT, AOL etc, but I've been told they're no good) and have nothing to go on.

Freedom 2 Surf are my prefered choice of ISP and I'm pretty much settled on that (unless you know otherwise), but what router works really well with macs from OS9 - 10.3 and has a built in Firewall that allows each individual machine to maintain it's own Firewall at the same time?

Cheers for your input
 

Sweetfeld28

macrumors 65816
Feb 10, 2003
1,489
29
Buckeye Country, O-H
I use SBC Global DSL. When i signed up with them, the basic package is something like $29.95. This price includes the modem, dsl filters, and everything that you would need. However, they only let you connect one computer to it. So, i upgraded for an extra $50 bucks and got the 2Wire wireless modem. I currently have two macs running on it, an iBook, and my G4. I haven't used any other DSL services, but i also haven't had any problems with SBC.


SBC Yahoo! DSL
 

Dr. Zauis

macrumors member
Feb 29, 2004
86
0
St. Louis, MO
Sweetfeld28 said:
I use SBC Global DSL. When i signed up with them, the basic package is something like $29.95. This price includes the modem, dsl filters, and everything that you would need. However, they only let you connect one computer to it. So, i upgraded for an extra $50 bucks and got the 2Wire wireless modem. I currently have two macs running on it, an iBook, and my G4. I haven't used any other DSL services, but i also haven't had any problems with SBC.

I use SBC Yahoo DSL and one time it went down and I called tech support. After I got it back up and running(only checked on 1 computer) I found out that only 1 computer could get on at a time.(had the service for 2 yrs and all my computers could get on at the same time) I called back and they said that I need to pay more for more computers to connect. I was like WTF. So I hung up and called the router company(netgear) and they gave me the firmware to allow multiple computers to connect at once for free.

SBC DSL has decent speed (1070 Kbps @ CNET.com bandwidth meter)
but the tech support sucks and for me and the service goes down about once every 3-4 months.
 

stoid

macrumors 601
Dr. Zauis said:
I use SBC Yahoo DSL and one time it went down and I called tech support. After I got it back up and running(only checked on 1 computer) I found out that only 1 computer could get on at a time.(had the service for 2 yrs and all my computers could get on at the same time) I called back and they said that I need to pay more for more computers to connect. I was like WTF. So I hung up and called the router company(netgear) and they gave me the firmware to allow multiple computers to connect at once for free.

SBC DSL has decent speed (1070 Kbps @ CNET.com bandwidth meter)
but the tech support sucks and for me and the service goes down about once every 3-4 months.

We signed up for SBCGlobal shortly before the $50 upgrade to the router switched from ethernet+USB to ethernet+Wi-Fi. Recently though, they have made changes to the tech help system, after having gotten many many complaints about the service.
 

Blackstealth

macrumors regular
Apr 27, 2003
166
0
Bradford, UK
The Expatriate said:
I don't seem to recognise any of the names (except BT, AOL etc, but I've been told they're no good) and have nothing to go on.

I've been using BT Broadband (the no frills one) since my exchange went live in October last year. I can't complain about the service level, it's never been down and it seems fast enough (576 down, 288 up). And it's now pretty cheap at £19 per month.

Bandwidth limits are a pretty grey area, I've seen some recent promotional stuff (in yesterdays paper) that says you're limited to 1Gb of data transfer per month, however when I signed up I was told that there's no limits as such, they just apply traffic shaping to limit your speeds if you're transferring huge amounts of files.

As for routers I'm running a D-Link DSL-504 with no problems whatsoever. Machines are running OS 9.1 through to 10.3 and Win 98 - 2k.
 
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