Subscriber information

Over the past three months, we have tried without success to find someone who can help us make use of the money and equipment that we have to improve the service to our existing users and extend it to other people in the village who have expressed an interest. This has been very frustrating for us and for those of you waiting to be connected. At this stage, with BT likely to provide an ADSL (telephone-based) service in the next three to four months, we could not justify the cost of further installations even if we could find someone to do them, and must finally admit defeat.

We intend to continue the service for existing subscribers at its present level until the contract with our service provider ends on 5th July 2005. Anyone wanting to move to ADSL before that date can do so without penalty. We continue to monitor the network, and you can notify us of any problems in the usual way.

The village website and the garboldisham.net e-mail addresses are independent of the broadband service and will continue to exist after this has been closed down. Broadband customers will need to set up their e-mail programs to collect mail from the garboldisham.net mailboxes or tell us where mail to these addresses should be redirected. See the e-mail page for details.

The following information may be helpful:

• There are two ways that logging in is handled. If we know the MAC address of the Netgear box you are using, then you will be logged in automatically as soon as you try to connect to the Internet. This is the recommended method, and if you are still seeing splash screens you should contact us.

  If we do not know your MAC address, the first attemp to connect will result in a login splash screen. Once you have logged in this way, you are in for 24 hours. This is managed by the core network nodes so turning your computer (or even your Netgear box) on and off makes no difference. Once your 24 hours are up, the connection will be dropped, even if you are using the system at the time. The recommended approach is to start your browser when you start up your computer, and either log in if you are offered the splash screen or use your browser history to go to the splash screen and log in anyway. That way you will remain connected all day.

• There is no way to log out. However, the connection is tied to your machine so it cannot be hijacked when you are not using it.

• Some users initailly had problems receiving signals from more than one access point. The Netgear box seems to pick one of the available ones at random. We made some changes to the system that appear to have helped with this. However, if you have problems it is worth using the Netgear configuration utility to select your usual access point. Alternatively, on Windows XP, you can select Run, type "cmd" in the box, and then type "ipconfig /release_all" and then "ipconfig /renew_all" to get a connection from the node you are linked to.

• We have problems with the lease mechanism on anything other than Windows XP. As a temporary solution we are allocating fixed addresses for users with other operating systems or special hardware. Please ask if you need one. Note that these restrict you to connecting to a single node unless you change the address.

• The main nodes are "Church Omni" (all round, but local), "Church Yagi Pub" (points east from the church), and "Church Yagi Bakery" (points south). A node that doesn't point in your direction is best avoided, as the signal is likely to be erratic.

• If you are getting poor download speeds or erratic connections, then the most likely cause is lack of signal on the wireless connection between you and the satellite. There have been some reports of loss of signal in the rain. In theory, rain and fog themselves make very little difference. In practice, we may be losing signal when the aerials get wet. With no engineering support, we have been unable to improve on this. The core wireless network and satellite connection seem to have been quite reliable.