It had to happen (well it did a while ago now); the minute I offer to host someone’s website my DSL modem packs up! Unfortunately I am on a BT managed service from Demon. I say unfortunate, not from the Demon experience, but from the BT managed bit, because the modems they supply are/were atrocious. I had an Efficient Networks Flowpoint modem/router/4 port hub. This had been my 3rd, the first two having blown their power supplies. This last one just seemed to get tired and sadly died two weeks ago.

The good thing about a BT managed service though is that I can just phone up Demon support and they get BT to come and bring me a new one. The new modem is in the same shaped box, but is now badged Siemens, it has upgraded firmware, and best of all a 4 port 100Mb/s switch, which has just saved me about £12 as I had been planning to buy one to improve connectivity between my PC and whatever wireless device I put in the living room to stream media to.

So it wasn’t all bad news. So far, there’s been no outages either, other than the odd routing problem at the Demon end.