Mikes broadband page:

This page will soon be moving to a Verizon or Doteasy website. After putting up with at least one phone call to Comcast's customer support I have finally had enough. Every review for Comcast's Internet on DSL-Reports and other popular websites mentions how lackluster their support is. The problem stemmed from their spam blocker service identifying my IP as a spammer and locking out my email address's. An hour on their live support feature did nothing except get me their 800 number for support. Another forty five minutes arguing with the 'tech' and a supervisor did nothing. The supervisor sent off an email to the folks who run their blacklist saying to remove my name from the list. I gave them another day to get this done and things still didnt work. I called again and finally argued through the tech who answered that I had called several times already and got 'Oh, here you are. You called last night.' Things still wherent working and they suggested I send an email off to get removed from the blacklist. I still want to know how I am supposed to send an email when my SMTP server has me blocked!? Let me also say that I have been having customer support problems ever since Comcast took over from AT&T. AT&T easily had one of the best rated service departments in the business while Comcast has always been near or at the bottom. I have written snail mail letters, called, emailed and problems still havent gotten resolved. Hello Verizon!

Hello. Since recently becoming fed up with poor phone line quality in my hometown I recently entered the world of broadband internet access. This decision was also helped by my dialup ISP making broadband more competitive by raising the rates they charged for internet access. I also want to mention that one of the reasons I didn't mind paying a little extra for AT&T is that years ago when I had their AT&T Worldnet dialup they offered 24/7 customer support and where always quick to respond and actually fix the problem.
Hopefully after the AT&T & Comcast merger the resulting company will continue with AT&T's excellent customer service department.

I decided to go with 3-Com's OfficeConnect cable modem. 3Coms name easily speaks for itself since they are US Robotics reincarnated. Unfortunately customer service has suffered since the name change. :-( Another thing, it seems 3com supports their products as good as Creative Labs, they try something, promote it and then discontinue it and abandon all actual support for it. I'd strongly recomend another brand of cable modem because of spotty/non-existant support even though this modem has worked fairly well for me. I want to add that anything with USRobotics on its nameplate seems to have excellant (without too much of a fuss) support usually including a five year unconditional warantee while anything that says 3Com is spotty at best.

After much searching on the internet I finally found a half way decent site to compare routers. Timhiggins.com runs a nice site for reviews and information. One feature I really found useful was the side by side comparisions! There are also some benchmarks added as they have time and plenty of information on what features are and how they are or are not useful. Using this site I decided on the Linksys BEFSR41. Linksys also makes a 1 port router but for a few bucks more I was able to replace my four port Netgear EN104tp hub with a switch. Another nice thing about this router is that it enables you to enter a custom MAC address for the WAN side. This allows you to report a specific MAC address to your cable company for a certain ethernet card and then allow the router to show up with the MAC address of the ethernet card allowing its use on your cable company without them knowing you are sharing your connection. One of the more basic but extremely useful security features on this router is the ability to block ping requests on the WAN side. This way if there is a potential hacker out there searching for active IP address's and he pings your address it won't reply and hopefully they will skip right over you. I have been running with this router for several months and even though I see the cable side activity light going nuts very little has gotten through so far and everything has been logged with the *FREE* Wallwatcher which keeps a more detailed log of the routers activity. I have noticed my cable company likes to check out its customers but there are plenty more entrys everyday from unscrupulous people. Even if you have only one PC I would still recomend a decent hardware firewall/router. It is worth the money and I haven't had it crash or need to be reset as of yet. I believe I paid around $70 for this on Amazon.com and the price has dropped to $49 (with rebates) and used ones are for sale as well. This is about the price of some software firewalls I have seen. If you would like to order this router off of Amazon.com I have included the following link:
Linksys BEFSR41 on Amazon:

The above Amazon.COM links will generate credits for the webmaster of this page and are added for your convenience.

Wallwatcher.com makes a nice *FREE* logviewer to replace the basic one that Linksys provides for their routers.
With this handy utility I have also noticed that quite often my own Internet provider will check certain ports. There are also a lot of incoming traffic from various places on the net. I never bothered keeping a log when I used a dialup ISP but this one is worth installing and this traffic is also a pretty good reason to put a hardware firewall up. Occasionally the modem needs to be reset and I know sometimes the cable activity light on it goes crazy even though nothing is happening on my home lan side.

I also have used a nice wireles setup in my house. I have one of the first wireless setups, Raytheon's Raylink. I have their earlier version with a slower speed and few security arrangements. I believe the hopping sequence and ESSID should be sufficient either way for most purposes. The speed is claimed at 1mbs and can drop to half this speed when reception is marginal or when running on battery power. Even the halved speed is sufficient for broadband access. I have run the following DSL tests and have not noticed much of a difference between fast ethernet (100base-t) and the same network over the Wireless LAN. While Raytheon is a great company and they have some incredible cutting edge products they need to market themselves more for us consumers and lower their prices unless they want to stay a primarily government supplier. The only problem I have had with these products was traced down to a IRQ problem in the cheap (non Raytheon) ISA to PCMCIA that I bought at a computer show. Windows kept reporting everything was working fine but I was not able to make a connection. I switched IRQ's to another unused IRQ and things started working perfectly. The Access Point (A device that connects your wireless network into a wired one) is easily controlled via Telnet or through the built in serial port. The nice thing about this is increased security. Newer versions will allow you to control the AP from a web based interface. This product has worked fine with both TCP/IP and NetBeui. Using an access point to enable you use wireless products (laptops etc.) with your wired network is simple. Just select an IP address on the AP between your routers IP and where it starts dynamically assigning IP's to wired computers. This will allow you to use a safe static IP address for your access point. The connected wireless devices will then seek out the DHCP server on your router and will get their own address's as needed.

Mike's poormans firewall
This is a completely *FREE* software solution which should help secure your home or small office network.

Or try the top-rated ZoneAlarm PRO for 30 days. ZoneAlarm Pro is not just your average firewall but also heavily cuts back advertising including pop-ups and banner advertising. Ancestry.com and Yahoo's free mail sure do look different with no advertising! This handy program also maintains some pretty nice logs to let you know what is happening. I have found this program extremely easy to configure and setup and very effective against advertisements of just about any kind!
Download ZoneAlarm Pro

DSLReports.com contains a quick easy check to see who and what kind of DSL service may be available in your business or residence. Check out their more than useful tools section for speed and security tests.

Solutions4sure

Sygate Online Services check for open ports, firewalls etc. Thorough and easy to use! Nice!

testmyspeed.com test your internet speed and has some decent links for testing the vulnerability of your PC/Firewall

Speedguide.net has loads of useful information on overclocking, uncapping and more!

securityspace.com charges for most services but has useful free security tests including a small denial of service (DOS) attack

homenethelp.com extesnive site explainging differences in router features

firewallguide.com lots of links and some information.

cable-dsl.home.att.net This site explains some of the facts and myths about file sharing and how it may be exploited.

Graphical backbone internet status

Got comments or a question you need/want answered? Just curious if something can be done? Just want to post your websites address to get more coverage? Well then ask the GURU!


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