Thanks for the comments and I will re-investigate what is causing the delay. The only reason I suspected it was Sphere is that was the last plugin I installed, and while the page is loading the status bar shows it is trying to contact sphere.
There may well be many other issues causing problems and I will continue to investigate and I never meant this to be a rant against the Sphere plugin which is generally quite good.
]]>Tony
]]>I never really expected the maximum connection speed – at the moment I am on a 2MB line so anything around that will suit my needs fine. The uncapped bit is more important as the PC often spends the wee small hours downloading distros and the like.
I had worried that Sky would be like you described. I have the microfilters, and the ADSL Modem / Router box already so it is just the line I need. I am (fairly) confident I can set it up without an engineer so the £40 connection fee and £17 per month is just insane as far as I can see.
Once again, thanks for your comments – I will see what other options are available (Freeview TV is more than I watch anyway, so the Sky TV packages are just an unnecessary luxury …).
]]>Sky-wise I’m on Sky Max. It is fast but you’ll only get 16MB if you live next to the exchange. It’s also uncapped and I’ve had no problems so far, but I’m not running a server off the connection.
It’s currently only available in some locations so I signed up an interest in it before Christmas but didn’t get it till March. What they do is offer Sky Connect to anyone who isn’t in a suitable location, which I wouldn’t sign up to. You order and they send round a Sky router and microfilters for all the sockets. After that there’s a delay while they activate your line and then you give your current provider the Mach code to switch your line. At this point it all goes wrong for a while. You have to use the Sky router to connect to Sky, but your connection won’t be activated immediately so you won’t know if you’ve got everything working right. Having said that the offline time moving from Tiscali to Sky ended up being about six hours.
Once I’d connected there were further problems with Sky dropping the connection, but they said that was a problem at the exchange they were trying to fix. The temporary fix was restarting the router. It took a week to clear up, but since then it’s been unnoticeable.
Getting someone else’s laptop from PCWorld to work with the wireless connection has been an entirely different matter…
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