Yep. I decided to go broadband, and living out in the sticks I picked Tiscali 512k unlimited as my provider. Speed is not an issue..out here, the lines are probably quite past it anyway!
I did some research as well..we wanted to share the connection. I opted to buy a refurbished Speedtouch 510 ADSL Modem/Router, and a Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router. This meant we could all share the connection at once, and weren’t tied to one place.
Well, that was the plan. The Speedtouch is brilliant. The Linksys was a headache. DHCP was broken, as was half the functionality. I went through 3 firmware updates and one downgrade before I found a reasonable and useable one. Even so, if you tried streaming video or anything high traffic, it would lock up.
The connections wouldn’t drop, but the whole thing would just stall. The same happened at random if I fired up my laptop and it tried to connect to the wifi..everything would die.
Then there were the random “no reason” lockups. It could work for weeks, or crash 5 times in one evening. It was this that finally drove me to change my setup.
I removed the Linksys, and connected the ethernet port of the speedtouch to the uplink port of an old 10mb hub. I then bought a Netgear ME102 WiFi Access Point off Novatech for £10 and hung that off the hub.
The Netgear is rock solid, the hub is incapable of thought, so is as reliable as it gets, and the Speedtouch is now my sole firewall/NAT device and DHCP server. OK, it’s limited to 10mb due to the hub, but I only have 11mb wireless and 512k ADSL, so it’s no hardship.