[LINK] Do Telstra require MS Windows for broadband?

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

I've just moved from Canberra back to Sydney (real beaches again yippee)

A couple of weeks ago I got Telstra Broadband installed on top of the
Foxtel installation I had previously organised.

An installer came out and put in the cable and fixed up my WinXP laptop
(there was a configuration problem with a DNS setting, but he fixed that
pretty quickly)

I had an ongoing problem with the connection dropping out. I had to log out
of WinXP and log in again (no power down, just log off/log on). This turned
out to be a problem with my firewall not letting the heartbeat through.

I then bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router and followed the
installation instructions and got that working. There were some Bigpond
network issues that messed things up for me - I kept thinking I was being a
real dummy, when in fact it was the network.

Anyway the wireless router made the heartbeat problem go away, so I didn't
have to change the firewall settings.

I now run four machines - Win98 laptop, Win2k desktop, WinXP laptop and a
Red Hat linux desktop machine. The three I attached after getting the
wireless router and the WinXP machine sorted out worked just fine. In fact
I have more trouble getting the windows machines to talk to each other than
getting them to talk to teh Internet. The Linux machine can see the Win
machines and I'm now playing with ftp on it. I can't get the ftp program to
write to the local disc, but I'm sure I'll sort that out.

The laptops now have wireless access and I'm having great fun playoing with
various machines in various places around the house. Sitting by the pool in
the sun surfing the Internet is a new experience. Pity I can hardly see the
screen 'cos of the sunlight - but everything comes at a cost.

So my long answer to the question is No, they don't require Windows for
broadband, but they may require it for assisted installation.

-- 
The internet is a great way to get on the net. 
-- Bob Dole

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au