The dialled digits 161 have been linked to spam use but where, after dial tone,wll 161 go to, I appear to get no tone so it could lead to somewhere. Mike

We've moved into a house with fairly thick internal walls (*). The router's wifi does not cover the whole house. As a first attempt to solve this, I tried a Homeplug/Wifi adaptor, connected over mains wiring to another Homeplug device that is plugged into the router. However over-the-mains connection speed drops to about 5 Mbps within a couple of rooms and is undetectable further away than...

On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:09:54 +0100, Java Jive wrote: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48756030 "Hackers targeted mobile phone networks around the world to snoop on specific users, according to a report. The level of access they gained to the networks meant they could have shut them down had they wanted to.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48756030 "Hackers targeted mobile phone networks around the world to snoop on specific users, according to a report. The level of access they gained to the networks meant they could have shut them down had they wanted to. US-Israeli security firm Cybereason concluded "with a high level of certainty" that the hackers were based in China, probably...

Over a year ago I took out an fresh month contract for BT Broadband that included free BT Sport. This was mostly to watch the Ashes, but as it was at night and my student days are behind me I couldn't stay awake enough to watch most of it (and we lost). I also watched the odd football match. The Sport ran out last month, but I let it roll on briefly because English teams were still in both...

On a Windows 7 PC I can set up a dial-up VPN connection to a Draytek router at a remote location. Using the same IP address and login credentials I try to set up a VPN on a Windows 10 PC. It fails saying "Windows could not create your connection" - a typical Microsoft unhelpful error message! Does anybody know why the VPN client works with Windows 7 and not with Windows 10, and so what to...

Another dodgy BT try-on call - I'm not even with BT LOL https://soundcloud.com/myozone/dodgeybtcall

My street and many others in my area were cabled by Virgin Media some weeks ago. Considering how expensive I have heard that it is to do so, I am surprised that they seem to be taking their time in connecting us to their network. I have heard that it can take up to a year or never happen. Does anybody have any more info on time-scales? -- Cheers,

We've just moved into a new house. We ordered phone/broadband from our ISP (Plusnet) yesterday and the BT Openreach engineer came this morning to set everything up - and found that yesterday another engineer had disconnected the line-pair to our house and used it for another customer, believing that it was unused because the previous occupants had ceased the phone/broadband service and we...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47692485 "Britons who get their broadband from the UK's biggest suppliers are the "most likely" to be getting a bad deal, reports Which? The consumer group's latest broadband satisfaction survey places the big providers at the bottom of rankings for service. Customers complained about slow speeds, poor value for money, connection dropouts and general...

I live in a village that's just been fibred up by Gigaclear. It's very tempting to just sign up for 900Mbs. But I really don't think I need that speed. There are only two of us and the only streaming services we use are Netflix etc., one thing at a time. We're currently with Zen and getting 78Mbs on an up-to-80 FTTC conection. If I stick with Zen I can upgrade to g.fast and get close to...

Assuming that I set up my email client to use authenticated logon for SMTP (rather than anonymous) is there likely to be a problem with reading POP email from my Plusnet account and sending email (either using Plusnet's SMTP server or Sky's) with a "from" address of my Plusnet address? I know some ISPs can be very fussy about letting you access "foreign" mail servers (ie not the ones that...

I've got a Plusnet Hub One router and all the PCs on my network are set to use normal DHCP to get their IP and DNS server. One PC, Windows 7 Home Premium, is connected to the router by a pair of Powerline devices (one in the router, one that the PC is plugged into) because the wifi signal is a bit weak and it's not practical to run an Ethernet cable. Everything has worked fine. I've bought...

I currently use Plusnet as an ISP and they have their own Usenet (News) server that clients such as Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird can access. We may be changing to Sky who do not have a news server. Are there are reputable free news servers that can be accessed from an ISP that does not have its own new server?

If we go for a Sky ISP connection, it looks as if I'll have to use the Sky Q Hub because my beloved TP Link 9980 doesn't support MER/61 authentication which Sky uses. I've seen mixed reports about port forwarding - some people saying that it doesn't work. I want to map:

I have a standard PN "unlimited BB" account I had one in my previous abode with no complaints but at my new flat it appears rather slow. (currently downloading a 700MB YouTube file - estimated time 10 hours, used to take 1-2 hours.) Just did a check using: https://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48268427 "Phone and internet users to get end-of-contract alerts Broadband, pay-TV, mobile phone and landline customers must be told when their contracts are about to end and be informed of their providers' best alternative deals, under new rules. The UK's communications watchdog Ofcom aims to help users avoid overpaying.

Why is it not possible to get the source code to a trusted party which can look at it and check for deliberate back doors, and then have a system where you can verify that the executable in the box is byte for byte same as what the escrow version compiles to? It would be slightly aggressive to do this, but China is not exactly your friend... Obviously if - as GCHQ suggests - the problem with...

Folks, I was thinking of getting a couple of these, so I can build a VPN which includes my Spanish an UK homes. https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/15136-draytek-v2760-k/ Is this a good solution? How do I choose where my traffic appears on the internet?

I asked Zen whether they supported IPv6: "All our IP addresses are static. We can offer you up to 16 static IP addresses and then we would need you to complete a requisition form if you wish to have any more than this. We can provide IPV6 on request, again anything over 16 would need a written request."