Free Modems Suck
by Pete Hindle
If you’ve been given a router from your internet provider, I’d recommend throwing it away and replacing it with something else. Anything else. A forty quid ADSL router and modem is going to be as good as the free turd-with-ethernet-port you get in the post. Got that?
Most of today has been an exercise in pointlessness, by trying to follow the help pages on BT’s website to plumb in a wireless router. This has the surprising effect of allowing half of a web-page to load before completely stopping all network access, including access to the setup page so you have to do a hard reset.
The device gets pretty close to working, but the BT router is so unfriendly that it has the giant greasy fingerprints of engineers all over it. I can’t think of the last time I needed to access some of the functions that are listed here, but the essential function (‘work with a wireless access point that my girlfriend brought on the high street’) is not there.
D’you want an XBridge wireless router? No idea how to configure it mind. Boxed. Won’t work with my Apple Extreme.
That’s very kind of you, but both the girlfriend and myself have Apple laptops… I just want to beat the people who make these devices with the international ISO file for wireless communications. “Standards!” whump! “Are!” whump! “Good!” WHUMP!
Oh, it works fine with Apple, that’s all I’ve ever had. The only thing it doesn’t do is work with the little box that runs my hifi on the network.