2010-03-09 #2

Defeat ripped from the jaws of victory or what do you call two ex monopolists?

After last night's triumph I was musing about BT's ability to support their Hub and my suspicions that there is a DHCP bug on the home hub and how large organisations really need to understand the software they use and how open source products make skills acquisition easier; although BT have no excuse, since the hub is a Linux derivative, hence open source but they outsourced the development, and for months have denied any knowledge or responsibility for its functionality.

I'd also add I think their support has got better over the last six months. They guy I spoke to yesterday was excellent, although finding the phone number was harder than I'd like. Once upon-a-time, you couldn't do anything but talk to BT, or at least listen to a voice mail menu.

My biggest frustration has been the instability of Vista's connection with the BT Home Hub's Wifi Channels. (see BT Home Hub here on this site.) I shared this with my colleague Tim Reczek who pointed me at the network card's control panel applet, which has an alternate IP configuration panel. He advised me that

if an XP or Vista system can't get an IP address it uses the alternative but the default automatic alternate IP address it uses is not very common, it might be best to configure the alternate address manually to maximise the chance it is a valid IP address

and you can do this in the knowledge of your home router's configuration parameters. The error message I have trapped on my Vista machine suggests this might be the case, Why has it taken so long to discover what a friend had in his head; he does admit he knows too much about the registry.

I find it disgraceful that BT & Microsoft can't get their act together to support joint customers, but its back to what you need to know to make this stuff work. They're both using last century strategies of dumping cost on their customers.

See more at this thread at file save us

Short URL: http://is.gd/a4m6t

The first comment below notes that Dell's ContolPoint Connection Manager might be a factor and that blaming BT and Microsoft as the sole culprits, can you have sole culprits, might be a bit unfair.