Matthew Revell

I’ve signed up for Entanet‘s part of the BT 21CN trial, So, soon BT will turn up and install a line that’s hooked up to their new pure IP network. I get a 24 Mbit broadband connection and £50 of calls per quarter.

Those in the trial pay nothing but can choose to continue the service – for an as yet undecided fee – at the end of the trial.

You probably haven’t come across Enta before. I only know them because they’re reasonably local to Wolverhampton and I’d always assumed they were a small-scale ADSL reseller and web host, with a sideline in voice telecoms. So, I’m kinda surprised to see them as the only non-BT ISP in this 21CN trial.

You can apply for the trial by emailing 21cn@entagroup.com. Someone from Vivaciti – new to me – will then give you further details. The catch is that you have to be in the catchment of one of the trial exchanges. If you’re in Wolverhampton, you need to be connected to the Penn exchange. Other exchanges are across the West Midlands and include:

Burntwood, Castle Bromwich, Central (Birmingham?), Chelmsley Wood, Edgbaston, Halesowen, Sheldon, Stechford, Victoria and Wood Gate.

You can find out what your local exchange is on the excellent SamKnows site.

The past few days I’ve tried using my ThinkPad R50e with a wired connection to my Linksys WRT54GS (version 6). I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).

Each time I plugged the Ethernet cable into the Thinkpad, Network Manager took far longer than usual to connect to the network. Once connected, I had no access outside my own network – i.e. no internet access – and even connecting to some machines on my network was hit and miss.

The fix: a firmware upgrade. My router was running 1.50.6 of the firmware. Under 1.50.9, everything’s fine and dandy. Visit the WRT54GS downloads page.