A BT Home Hub and a Mac
One of MMISoftware’s clients wanted to set up a BT Home Hub (business service) in their office to use with their Macs. (The reason they wanted to do this was because they had been using one.tel (now part of Carphone Warehouse) and had experienced persistent outages and couldn’t get anyone at one.tel to fix it). So the order was placed and within a couple of days a box arrived containing the wireless hub, a CD and some phone connectors, and within the week the line was active.
BT (British Telecom) came out of the old UK Post Office when the telephone industry was privatised in back in the 80s. I had never used any of their ‘internet products’ and so did not really know what to expect in terms of Mac support and ease of setting things up.
Setting up: It was a breeze. Basically, we followed the instruction in the box. Plugged an adapter in to the phone socket, plugged in the hub and turned it on. Next, inserted the CD in the Mac and followed the on-screen instructions (yes, BT Home Hub comes with a Mac installer and it actually works).
Everything went great until we got to a point where the Mac was ‘talking’ to the hub, and the hub was (supposedly) talking to the ‘internet’. What was weird about this process was that the screen said that the ‘chat’ may take some time and the Mac was making odd (and after awhile, very annoying) pinging noises. In fact it sounded like we were in some old war movie with destroyer hunting a sub (ping – ping – ping – pinga – ping – pinga – ping – ping). After 10 minutes of pinging it was clear something was wrong so a call was put in to the help line. After navigating through the usual phone menu from hell (for this press 1, for that press something else) we got a real live person, who took some details, fiddled with something on their screen, which tweaked something on the hub, and it all worked!
Success!!!
Adding another Mac: Dead easy. Select the network in the Mac Airport drop-down menu and select 40/128-bit hex, and type in the password. Now, you may ask, where do you get the password? Well, believe it or not, it is printed on the bottom of the wireless router (seriously!). That is some sort of weird security….
A problem: Now, this was an unexpected problem. Once you are on the BT network, you can only use BT email addresses to send mail. You can access your mail on non-BT servers, but you can’t send anything using that address. You may think that this wouldn’t be a problem, however, if you are running a company with its own domain name, then it is. And as this was a ‘company package’ from BT then you would think this would be a common problem and easy to solve.
As far as I can see there is no mention of this on the BT website, and when I spoke to a tech (having gone through the ‘phone hell’ again) they said that the only solution was to register the domains with the BT network so that the emails can use their mail servers. However, there was a problem with this approach – MMISoftware handles the domain registrations for this particular client so the domains are registered to MMISoftware at their address, and as the address of the newly installed BT Home Hub was different, the domains couldn’t be registered for use with the BT servers. The BT tech said MMISoftware would have to change the registration details… this was not a good idea as:
- It would take time – several days possible for the details to change, and the client wanted to send business emails as soon as possible.
- All correspondence associated with the domain name would go to the client, and then they would have to forward it to MMISoftware.
A solution: Well, I found a simple solution that didn’t involve changing registrations, and had added benefits. I went over to UK2.net (which hosts the website anyway) and registered for their secure mail server. This means that the client can now send emails using their domain name(s) over the BT network, plus there is the added advantage that when they are traveling with the laptop they can continue to send emails using their domain. A win-win situation.
