Recently in ADSL Category

Pipex was down yesterday afternoon - ccording to the official sources, there was a major network failure which affected dialup and adsl connections in the uk from 11am until late sunday afternoon. In my experience the failure was about 6pm on Saturday night and lasted until about 4pm on Sunday. When I discovered it on Sunday afternoon I tried to ring the helpdesk but got a busy tone all the time. Eventually I found another number and got through to a recording which told me the support line was closed (so why the engaged tone?) and that they only cover weekdays and part of Saturday - not impressed. Eventually I managed to get to the status page which took forever on a 9600 modem to find it was this major network outage. Not even their alternative free dialup would have been any good as this would also have been affected. So the fact that a major network component failed, no alternative and a closed support desk, slow status page means i'm looking for an alternative.
Whilst in the office hall this morning I spotted a flyer for ezeconnect broadband provided by Kleeneze of all people. This is the company that sells cleaning products through catalogues shoved through the postbox. Just what could they possibly know about broadband? On closer investigation I think its just a rebadged plus.net reseller with the same prices as plusnet (and same package names!) but they get commission (and you get commission if you refer someone else). I'm just stunned at the sheer weirdness of reselling broadband.
However, if I was going to resell broadband, then I'd make sure that at least one link on my homepage at eze-connect.com would work before starting to advertise the service. Instead all their links point to the the main page - oops!

Tested my bandwidth on the laptop this morning and got a respectable 503.1Kbps or 61.7Kbytes/sec which is as expected. I'm going to test it in the office to see what that gives as I'm sure we are not getting the full bandwidth we pay for (or MRTG is not reporting it correctly!)

Whilst searching for a new adsl router on google (for the office) the first hit was for my own make and model of router. This page has a lot of configuration information for the router although the firmware download link is not available :-(
How to set up DABS Conexant AMX-CA64E Router in the UK

The hotel has 12 hours internet access for 12.99, or internet access, films, the rest of the tv channels (not just BBC1,2,itv,ch4 and ch5) and music until 11am the following day (more than 12 hours) for 19.99. Seeing as though the films were 7.50 each I guess thats a bargain.....
Still think that for a room that has a rackrate of 169 pounds you'd have thought it would have been free.

Just discovered that Pipex ADSL user have access to the BBC's Interactive website which provides high bandwidth entertainment pages (my description). Seeing as though I'm at work I can't test this at the moment but I will tonight!