Adventures in the BigPond NextG

Having an online job I really should have no excuses to be offline.

Wifi Ethernet, paid or unpaid, can be a little like finding a needle in a needle factory.

Solution: Popped into a Dick Smith and purchased a USB NextG Card.

Why BigPond? Microsoft’s mobile phone/data supplier is Telstra, and Cathye convinced me to do it over lunch.

Symptoms: I could register the card and account; however the IP address that was created was always a 169.254.x.x. The card was successfully seen with the BigPond software 2.7.3

After a week of working with the supplied software, including a very friendly support guy at Telstra Bigpond, I’ve decided to search out for further info.

Whilst I ran out of time to hunt down the root cause of the issue; it seems that the Vista install at Microsoft has some serious group policy restrictions on networking: so it’s workaround time.

In this process of looking for the solution, I turned off Vista’s UAC. That is a pretty big switch. Sort of like leaving your security alarm off when you leave home. I didn’t feel safe. UAC back on.

The card is distributed in Australia by a company called Maxon. They have a support forum. 20 minutes of reading, and there is a work-around. The card itself maps into Windows as a Port, and using the normal dial-up/PPP setting – you can just dial into the network and you are off.

(this post via BigPond NextG)