Some of you may have applied for an eircom broad band account.

Now it is a tad confusing how they do business, and I will detail our experience here so as to save you time and bother.

We applied for the account via tele sales. Got an email with a broad band connection username and password. In this email there is no mention of when you can activate your broadband connection.

Then we get a call from a technician telling us simply he has upgraded the line and the quality of it should be better now. What they did not tell us was that the line was enabled for broad band and it was now ok to connect.

We rang telesales asking when we could connect, they kept saying they did not know , they would get back to us with a time, but to bare with them. 2 weeks later the same message. We are now 4 weeks after the technician called with the cryptic message.

We then tired of waiting for the go ahead and tried to set up the connection ourselves and lo and behold it worked.

The moral of the eircom story is:

When the technician from the exchange rings with a cryptic message " the quality of the line should be better now". It is to be translated as the upgrade of the line to broadband that has taken place. You can then connect your broadband modem using eircom connection cd, that came with the netopia broadband modem.

Use the ethernet connection wizard. You must first connect the modem using windows presuming you have your pc in dual boot. ( i.e. linux as well as windows installed ). Once you have the windows connection completed boot in linux and you should get the eth0 connection OK message on startup. Remember in the network setting on linux to set the ip address to dhcp. This is vital. You connection should work now.

eircom at 19.99 inc vat per month. price as of 04/04/2006 this is a limited download service.

Well you have wireless and or Satellite. These forms offer download speeds far superior to land line speeds. They are generally more expensive, but of you club together a number of houses and use a wireless router you might have the same or a comparable price. When the JCB digs up the phone lines outside you will still be online. Heavy lightning can effect wireless broadband.