Cable steals a march on ‘Windows-only’ DSL

TeleWest adds Mac support to BlueYonder

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Data Networking, 16th January 2001 16:19 GMT

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Updated While domestic British DSL users are currently obliged to use Windows, BT's rival cable companies can now claim full support for a range of operating systems.

Telewest has quietly added Macintosh support to its Blueyonder cable offering this week, although the service actually went live Tuesday of last week, staff tell us. Rival NTL supports MacOS running later than 8.5. Of course it isn't just Mac users that can enjoy broadband... anything with DHCP and an Ethernet connection will work.

Actually, several of you have pointed out that Windows 2000 does work out of the box with BT's consumer DSL service, OpenWoe. Which ought to teach us to write about British DSL from 5,500 miles away.

But it's still not all plain sailing.

Macintosh drivers were distributed last November, according to one correspondent, and have yet to find their way through BT's four-month approval process.

And Windows 2000 users who have sensibly invested in SMP systems have found problems too...

"unless we tell windows 2000 to only use one processor the modem powers down anywhere between 10 and 40 minutes, requiring a PC reboot to get the line back up.
Suggestions point to the fact the modem chews up more power from the USB than recommend by standard usb specifications," writes a reader.

You can read more at the excellent ADSLguide website.

When we rang BT ADSL late last year, a knowledgable chappie offered to solve the Apple problem by taking out Mac users and "shooting them through the head". Which is a drastic, although failsafe, way of solving the compatibility problem, we suppose. ®