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BT have told us that on April 14th they will upgrade our exchange to provide ADSL broadband access. The standard service this will provide is 512Kbps (or roughly 10 times faster than a standard modem). What will you have to do to take advantage of this?
We know that there's a wide variety of computer knowledge in the village. This memo is an attempt to provide a basic level of background information that will help you decide what choices to make when ADSL finally goes "live" in Longparish.
We strongly advise people to take a look at the website www.adslguide.org.uk which covers all things related to broadband DSL - including providers and equipment. It will always be more comprehensive and up-to-date than this document which is really intended as a simple summary and introduction. Just because we mention a particular piece of equipment or broadband supplier in this document doesn't mean that we recommend it. It probably just means that it was one of the easier names to spell.
We won't go into what exactly DSL means or how it works - if you want that take a look at www.adslguide.org.uk - just bear in mind that DSL or ADSL are synonymous with high-speed internet connection to your home through your normal BT telephone wire. BT themselves provide the wire and Internet Service Providers (or ISPs) can provide you with the high-speed internet service using BT's cable. Confusingly enough, BT themselves can also do this, but it's a different bit of BT. By law they aren't allowed to give themselves any advantage over the other providers.
You may already use the internet, in which case you will already have a modem that you connect to the telephone line. This will not work with DSL and you will have to get hold of a new "DSL" modem to use the service. Some providers will give you a basic one free-of-charge if you sign up for their service for a period of time. You'll also need something called a "micro-filter" which effectively splits the broadband signal from the ordinary phone line. The service provider will probably give you one of these but if you have more than one phone on the line you use for broadband you will need to buy one for each additional phone. They cost only a few pounds.
You will need to continue to your BT phone line.
Although the broadband connection will share the same line as your phone calls you can still use the phone while browsing the internet. Ordinary faxes should also work, though we have heard that receiving or sending faxes while using the connection may temporarily reduce the performance of your internet connection.
If you have an ISDN connection like Home Highway you'll need to convert it back to an analogue line to have DSL connected. This will cost about £50.
As usual, new equipment is coming onto the market all the time. For a much better overview of what's available than we can begin to give you here check out http://www.adslguide.org.uk/reviews
With broadband your computer is permanently connected to the internet whenever it's switched on and plugged in to the phone line. In theory this means that anybody who can find out your computer's "Internet Protocol" or "IP" address can see what's on your computer or run programs on it remotely.
In order to stop this you need to have something called a firewall. This is less scary than it sounds, and is essentially either a program or a piece of equipment that stops unauthorized access to your computer or network, while allowing you to browse away quite happily on the internet.
If you use Windows XP you have a firewall built in to your computer's operating system and simply have to activate it. Unfortunately it's not the best one and as it is the most commonly-used it's also likely to be the most commonly attacked one. There are other solutions, like those built-in to the more advanced bits of equipment described below, or you can buy an independent piece of software like "Black ICE Defender" which costs £30 or more.
None of these solutions will protect you against email viruses, for which you need good anti-virus software kept up-to-date. Remember never to open attachments from people you don't know. This is good practice whether you use broadband or not.
The market is moving very fast at the moment, with low-end and high-end offerings appearing all the time. Some providers are now offering sub-512K services for reduced monthly rates. You can get 256K or even 150K services at prices down to £15 per month. At the other end of the spectrum there are companies offering 2MPbs services or even higher over "normal" ADSL lines.
Whether you can take advantage of these higher rates depends on a number of factors, including the quality of the connection between your house and the exchange. If you need this type of bandwidth you are probably already running a home office at least and may know more about the subject than we do, so if you have some experience of whether it works please do let us know.
When comparing service providers remember to look at all aspects of the service - the installation and setup costs, whether you need to purchase equipment (this may not be included in the quoted setup costs) as well as the monthly fee and whether you are committed for a fixed period or can cancel whenever you like. You should also think about how important it is for you to have good customer service as well as low cost. www.adslguide.org.uk provides comparison charts that rate all the DSL providers against each other. Often the cheaper solutions provide lower total performance or customer service and do make sure that any low prices are not just for an introductory period.
The final wrinkle regards performance. In addition to the quoted connection speed you need to be aware that there can be bottlenecks elsewhere in the system. One of these is the "contention ratio" - or the number of other people you're having to share bandwidth with. Cheap deals will usually quote contention ratios of 50 to 1 while business rates are usually down to 20:1. The providers themselves have to install high-speed networks to carry their subscribers' traffic, and if they haven't invested in the right kit it can mean that their total performance is low, even if the line to your home has a fast connection. Again, www.adslguide.org gives some idea of how different providers compare in total performance.
In order to give some ideas of what's available we have summarized a few different options below:
If you don't think you use the internet much and aren't that excited about megabit-per-second-screaming-video-on-demand-peer-to-peer-online-gaming you may wonder: Why bother? Good question.
The answers are that you'll certainly get a faster connection for doing things like online banking and bill-paying as well as being able to email digital photos or even video clips and carry out online research more easily than over an analogue modem. Even the lower-rate options at 128K or 256K are still a lot faster, and the "always-on" nature of broadband means that you don't get that annoying delay every time you want to check an email. In the final analysis you may even find that it's cheaper to get a low-end broadband connection than your current dial-up connection.
The simplest piece of equipment is a USB DSL modem. This simply plugs in to a USB socket on your computer (the small flat socket that your printer or digital camera plug into). If you don't have a USB socket on your computer you'll have to use a plug-in PCI card which is in fact cheaper but requires more installation effort. Most computers less than 4 years old will have USB.
An example of a simple USB modem is the D-Link DSL-200 available from Amazon.co.uk for £55
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000687BE/ref=sr_aps_electronics_1_1/026-2034545-3267630 .
Any company you sign up for will certainly be able to sell you one, or may provide one free of charge if you sign up for a contract. Typical costs for these entry-level modems are around £30. By the time you add £30-£50 for a software firewall you are pretty much into the same hardware costs as the "more intensive" installations, so if you want to feel a bit safer than just using the XP firewall it seems to make sense to increase the hardware budget a bit, even if you only have one computer.
As far as supplier options are concerned, if you want to keep costs to a minimum look at some of the lower-rate offerings. Tiscali, for example, offer a 150KBps connection for around £15 per month. This is one of the cheapest deals around at the moment but bear in mind that as well as lower speed you're probably also getting lower service (Tiscali do not currently score well on customer service according to adslguide) as well as a poorer contention rate. The good news is that in most cases there's no minimum commitment and you can usually upgrade to a faster connection if you find you need it.
If you have more than one computer at home you'll want to share your broadband connection between them. If you haven't tried networking them together now might be a good time to try doing so. It's pretty easy with even basic skills, particularly if you have Windows XP on your computers. There are some very useful and reasonably-priced bits of equipment on the market that will help you.
A "DSL Router" essentially allows you to network multiple computers together and share a DSL link. These little boxes also usually incorporate a firewall, so ensuring that your network will be free from outside interference. If you go for cables to connect the computers prices vary from £70 for the Zoom4 to £85 for the Netgear DG834 (which includes a firewall). If you want to be able to wander around with your laptop while browsing the internet or don't want to festoon your home with Ethernet cables you could try wireless networking - again pretty easy to set up - but the prices are a bit higher: £103 for the Netgear DG834G.
Bear in mind you'll also need a network adaptor for each computer that you want to connect. The wired ethernet ones are very cheap, while wireless ones are more pricey. If you go with wireless it makes sense to get adapters made by the same manufacturer as your router.
Again, there are many service provider options. You should probably be looking at a minimum of the regular 512K line rate.
If you are running a business from the village you should either already have a good grasp of what you need or you should get professional advice. That's not us. Call someone.
With that said, you'll find that the "more intensive" installation equipment will do a pretty good job for most small office requirements.
This document has ended up being rather longer than intended. Hopefully it has given you at least a background knowledge of what's available and some useful pointers to where to get more data. Since nobody in the village has any actual experience of using DSL from Longparish I expect we will all be learning together, so good luck and happy surfing!
LBAG
Alix Bremridge
David Gould
David Wright
Martin Lampard
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