The correct way to get broadband
I’d been toying with the idea of getting broadband for ages – a bit pricey at �25 a month, but I thought it would change my life, I’d use the internet more and in new and exciting (maybe even lucrative) ways.
I also wanted to go down the wireless route so I could sit in the garden shed updating my weblog (“The spider has spun a new web on the Nitromors can. Stopped raining. The squirrels are active again…”)
My mate Jon thought I should buy an Airport card for my iBook, plug it in and see what came up – just Jon being funny, I thought, so I ignored him and ordered a broadband package and a wireless router that would act as an ADSL router and WiFi base station all in one – hooked the beloved bondi blue iMac up to the router by ethernet and off I went.
A few weeks later I got my Airport card – the CD-ROM wouldn’t mount on my iBook so I just powered down the computer, slotted it in and powered back on.
The compter said: “Detected new Airport card… use default settings?”
Well, in the absence of any instructions, let’s do that.
And it worked, there I was browsing the web. Had problems with my email but that’s not unusual. Couldn’t connect to the router admin page, and the signal strength was a bit low, but hey, who cares, here I am lying on the sofa, websurfing wirelessly at high speed. Easy. Perhaps too easy, for what’s to stop some warchalkers stealing my costly broadband connection?
Later that night – probably about 4am – I pieced all the clues together and realised that the reason the signal was quite low, and I couldn’t send email and couldn’t see my router’s config web page was – my iBook wasn’t connected to my router at all, it was connected to someone else’s.
I switched my wireless router off at the mains, and sure enough my internet connection remained. Moving round the house I discovered it works best upstairs at the front, meaning someone across the street from us has an ADSL line connected to a wireless router with rather less than no security – I didn’t even need sniffing software like Macstumbler, the Airport Setup Assistant found it immediately on its own – the router’s SSID is ‘default.’
So Jon was right – I could have saved myself �150 for the router and �25 a month… just plugged in an Airport card and seen What Came Up.
Still, my neighbour’s WiFi router won’t work in my kitchen. And it certainly doesn’t reach as far as my garden shed.