Moving to BT Infinity

I'd been using the Andrews and Arnold service for a good few years, but although data was unlimited between 6pm and 9am, it was a bit more limited in "office hours". This in turn lead to my setting up iptables rules, then a time schedule on my router, etc; all to stop my children downloading my entire monthly allowance in an afternoon.

In April, they did exactly that. In fact, they downloaded twice my monthly allowance in an hour. I have no idea how they managed it, and of course each of them denied any involvement.

This led me to the discovery that FTTC is actually now available in my area.

That in turn led to some time looking at the deals available. On the face of it, Sky looked best, but having already paid BT line rental upfront (and this being non recoverable), it soon became a straight race between AAISP and BT, with BT ultimately winning due to their lack of setup charges.

After some hiccups which eventually got resolved (due, I suspect, in no small part to using the ceomail.com service), my service was finally set up.

A residual effect of my home set up was some static IPs. I was loath to go and change every device, so my preference was to get the BT Infinity router onto the 192.168.2.x domain.

This actually proved fairly simple - an amendment in the admin panel and then a restart.

I'd never been able to get my Sky Wireless Connector working with my previous ISP. A "Service connection fail" was the unhelpful message. However, now it works, and I have already used it to access a few programmes on catch up TV. Very pleased with this now. Next step is to see if my Sky+ app on my phone will now play nicely....

Having everything set up nicely last night, it was disappointing to say the least to find the connection on my Mac had failed on both ethernet and wifi this morning. Some digging suggests this is due to network being b/g/n rather than just b/g. I've made that change and we'll see if that works, although it's also apparent that restarts are sometimes required for ethernet connections.

Finally, the intention was to finally get my TP-Link WA901N extender properly working. This did turn out to be a bit of a trial. The key points to note are:

1. Connect the extender to a laptop / PC with *no* wifi connectivity.
2. Temporarily put the laptop into the 192.168.1.* range
3. Reset the TP-Link - allow at least 20 seconds of pressing reset button (I was not allowing enough time)
4. Connect to 192.168.1.254 via a browser
5. Change the static IP in the TP-Link to one in the 192.168.2.* range
6. Disconnect the ethernet cable, put laptop back into the 192.168.2.* range
7. Connect to new static IP via a browser
8. Move the TP-Link and check signal

So, fingers crossed my ethernet connection holds true this evening.