I have just had my first experience with the Post Office Broadband Customer Care Line... Boy what a job that is. Here's the situation.
A friend's mother inlaw gets the base PO BB package. This is basically a Netgear DM111P modem with a modified firmware to download the connection settings.
The information pack that she received gave her a email address and a password, as it turns out this is totally usless if you decide you would like to use your own router/modem as the modem/router uses a completely different user name and password.
The user name is easy to get off the router/modem as it is of course plain text. But the pass word well thats a b*tch to get from the DM111P (it's encrypted along with the username if you save the settings to XML)
She wanted to use a wireless router (she got a Netgear DG834GT and it's almost identical to the wireless router supplied by the PO as well as any other ISP).
I spent 20 minutes to PO's Customer Care Line and explained to them what I was trying to do ( the man on the other side thought that I was just trying to connect the PC to the wireless network). When he finally understood that the problem wasn't the ADSL line (after checking. I was banging my head against a wall during this). I give him the customers PO referance number and start date ( he said that the BB package had been cancled 7 times. Eventually this was cleared up after antother 15 minutes).
I eventually confirmed the username and "GOT A PASSWORD". Entered them with no joy.
Did a bit of head scratching.... and then it hit me. I checked the firmware version of the DG834GT and found out it was on version 1.02.09, so I download the newest version, flashed the bl**dy thing, checked the settings and bingo it worked.
Total time taken was about 2 hours (three quarters of that time was on the phone).
And the moral of this story is...
Well I leave that up to you to decide :)
A friend's mother inlaw gets the base PO BB package. This is basically a Netgear DM111P modem with a modified firmware to download the connection settings.
The information pack that she received gave her a email address and a password, as it turns out this is totally usless if you decide you would like to use your own router/modem as the modem/router uses a completely different user name and password.
The user name is easy to get off the router/modem as it is of course plain text. But the pass word well thats a b*tch to get from the DM111P (it's encrypted along with the username if you save the settings to XML)
She wanted to use a wireless router (she got a Netgear DG834GT and it's almost identical to the wireless router supplied by the PO as well as any other ISP).
I spent 20 minutes to PO's Customer Care Line and explained to them what I was trying to do ( the man on the other side thought that I was just trying to connect the PC to the wireless network). When he finally understood that the problem wasn't the ADSL line (after checking. I was banging my head against a wall during this). I give him the customers PO referance number and start date ( he said that the BB package had been cancled 7 times. Eventually this was cleared up after antother 15 minutes).
I eventually confirmed the username and "GOT A PASSWORD". Entered them with no joy.
Did a bit of head scratching.... and then it hit me. I checked the firmware version of the DG834GT and found out it was on version 1.02.09, so I download the newest version, flashed the bl**dy thing, checked the settings and bingo it worked.
Total time taken was about 2 hours (three quarters of that time was on the phone).
And the moral of this story is...
Well I leave that up to you to decide :)
