I phoned the cable company again about their 20mb broadband service and got a slightly different story to the first call.

To ensure I understood exactly how it works I asked some pretty dumb and straightforward questions but managed to get some good answers. First off ‘Where do I plug the cable modem in?’. They give you some kind of splitter and you connect the cable modem to the cable for the TV, with the splitter. Well that made sense, except that the cable’s in the wrong room. Then ‘How do I connect a laptop to the cable modem?’. The answer was that they give you an ethernet cable. Oh. Then ‘It’s not wireless then?’. Nope (Well that’s 2 steps back. Ed). The guy did say that you can get a cable DSL router for wireless connectivity.

I had a look at a couple of sites and you can get a cable router for about $60 so that’s not so bad. I started looking at the specs of these routers and for about $120 you can get them with a greater range, I think one of them said it had a range of up to 100 meters which beats the whatsit out of our puny 50 foot range. I assume the cable router connects to the cable modem by a erm a …cable.

So what have we got? Cable access give me a 20mb fat pipe, no download limit (Oh yeah, use the BBC iPlayer 24 hours a day and we’ll see about that. Ed) and about 6 times the range I currently have. Hmmm…no brainer.

I phoned the cable company to sign on and asked for it to be installed by one of their guys, if for no other reason than I can pick his brain about this stuff. Being plumbed in tomorrow morning.

The good thing about it being a cable modem connection is that we can have that running in parallel with our existing BT ADSL connection so I can spend a few weeks testing the darn thing, before I pull the plug on BT, and making sure the Internet radio’s and iPhone work OK with it.

Now what can go wrong?

The news from the grapevine is that our client for the project software, that jumped ship last week, actually want to get hold of the source code and have a go at the software themselves.

This has got to be hugely embarrassing for our company as the developers are effectively being told leave the software alone as you’re no good at it and let us have a go. What the heck do the managers talk about when they have meetings about the feasibility of this. They can hardly say ‘no the client hasn’t enough expertise to do that software development’ when that is exactly what the client is saying about us. Both sides can’t be right but maybe one side is. Well that definitely isn’t our lot as we’ve already screwed up once. Jeez, those meetings must be squirmy.

Have moved the router back to its original position as moving it to two other phone sockets actually made the reception worse in that one of the internet radios dropped out even more and my WoW Vista PC also kept dropping the connection every 10 minutes. Dunno whether I need a fatter pipe or a signal booster. One thing I can try is to use a different router. A couple of months ago I did get a backup Linksys router which I have nominally setup i.e. there is no encryption, but it will connect. Maybe I should use that and see if I get the same problems.

I have started looking into possible other ISPs and it does appear that the most I’m going to be able to get on the phone line is 4mb, the speed at which it has now become stable. Therefore it is pointless for me to switch to another provider which uses the phone line for connectivity, unless it is solely for cost reasons. If I want to get quicker then it appears that I need to go for a cable modem and which I have read I can get a 20mb pipe. Unfortunately it’s with a cable company with a lousy reputation for support.

I started looking at some ISP comparison sites and drilled down to the bad reputation cable company’s customer feedback and lordy, lordy were some of the comments negative. A few, where there had been no problems, were excellent. Further reading made me realise that a lot of those comments that were good were where the user had been able to set up the system OK. In all instances all of the comments for reliability and speed were really good. Those comments that were bad were always for support.

Setting up these things is usually quite straightforward but if one step goes wrong then unless you understand this stuff, you are at the mercy of support people. Maybe those people that gave the good comments were tech savvy and were able to wire it up OK and had no need of support people and those that gave the bad comments just don’t know stuff, hence an almost immediate reliance on support people who probably made the poor users feel a bit inadequate.

To make the switching of ISPs justifiable I also need to get the cost down. If I get just the 20mb package then the monthly cost goes up marginally. If I add a landline then, due to the far better call allowance with a phone from the cable company, then the two items – ISP and phone – are in total cheaper than what we are currently paying with BT.

But can I trust the cable company to switch the phone number between the 2 networks or will they screw up and leave us connectionless for a couple of days?