[Waverley ARS] FW: RE- ISP bandwidth

[Simon Buxton]

George Georgevits wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> SO my question to this learned group is: What is the support like 
> with some of these cheap offerings? Anyone had any experience? 
> Some places only work 9am to 5pm Mon to Fri, which is not a whole 
> lot of use for an internet service.
>   
Hi George

Can't help much on support, as my son Ben is a professional internet 
network engineer and knows far more than any support people!

>
>
> Also, the second reason I have resisted the urge to change is 
> that everyone knows my internet address, and I assume changing 
> addresses is like changing phone numbers - a real hassle? Any 
> advice on how to do this more or less painlessly?
>   
There are a few things you can do which may depend on how long your old 
ISP maintains access to their email facility after you cease using their 
service. We changed from Peoplenet to TPG five months ago but the old 
address still works (my email program searches several accounts 
automatically - last 2 ISPs and our own server). So you many be able to 
change over a period of time. My previous ISP before those two worked 
for several years!

The other way is to have a permanent address independent of ISP. You can 
do this this either by using a free service such as Hotmail or Yahoo 
(though some do this or all email, you then lose the benefit of a good 
email program) or alternatively buying your own domain name (eg 
www.georgevits.net) where you then get the issuer of the domain name to 
forward your email to your current ISP. You can also do this sort of 
thing through the club URL facility where Ben VK2XUF uses his mail 
server to forward mail to members. In this case you nominate an address 
such as vk2kgg at vk2bv.org which is forwarded to the ISP email address you 
nominate (you may already have this set up from when it was introduced a 
few years back - try it and see).  Registering a domain in the US costs 
about $10pa but I think Australian domain sellers (ie .au) are much more 
expensive. You probably don't need our approach which is to have our own 
domain name and mail server, where all the ISP does is provide an access 
pipeline into the internet.

Hope this helps a bit.

73 Simon
> Cheers,
>
> George Georgevits
> VK2KGG
>
>