A 100 mb pipe has now been put in place and tested between Bryan's back garden and the Cambridge technical centre for Virgin Media, a new router has been installed, and RIPE have issued us with our very own set of new IP addresses.

In theory therefore we should be ready to start rolling out the new 10mb (alas we'll need a few more members to afford leasing the whole 100mb). Initial trials of this have uncovered a few initial problems. These have mainly been fixed but a few remain (see below) but please bear in mind that the earlier you change over, the more of a pioneer you will be!.

How we do the changeover mainly depends on whether you have one of our routers. For those who do, we should be able to do everything fairly quickly without even needing to visit you. For those who don't there are two options depending on whether you are confident to do it yourself.

If you are, there are technical details on our website here. If not, please wait for us to contact you and arrange a time to visit. Even if you have to wait a bit, it will be worth it. The new service will once again be hugely better than anything else that is available from any other provider around here. In the meantime the existing 2Mb/s service will continue in parallel until the full changeover has been completed.

For those wishing to handle the process themselves, please go ahead. For those who can't, expect a call in the coming weeks to upgrade your service.

All best

The Committee

Technical Details for Reconfiguring Your Own Setup

If your IP address is set in your own equipment rather than a router which we have supplied and you want to change it yourself, please perform the following steps:

1. Change all instances of 217.154.114 to 91.216.112 - this should at least include your own IP address, the router IP address, and the DNS server IP addresses (usually 2).
2. If you are using something other than a 217.154.114 address for the DNS at the moment now is the time to get it right by using 91.216.112.253 and 91.216.112.240 (see technical page on the DNS for general help on this. and substitute 91.216.112 for 217.154.114 in all cases).
3. If you are using an IP address for the mail server, don't, use its DNS name (mail.{your-village}.co.uk) instead (see technical page on email for setup details).
4. Check it out and make sure it all works but note that if you have any special set-up to allow incoming traffic to your IP address this won't work until your DNS entry has been changed. It is worth at least checking that you can still visit your favourite web sites and that email to a selection of addresses (on the R&SP network and off it) still work. If they don't, see Troubleshooting below.
5. When you are ready to commit to the changeover, please email support at swaffham-prior.co.uk so that your DNS entries can be updated (including your IP address in the message - it's not always all that easy to work back from a name to DNS entry). It is important to do this as certain things may not work fully until the DNS entries refer to the new address.

Known Issues

Issues Recently Resolved

• We were seeing actual speeds of only 1.8Mb/s and 3.5Mb/s over wireless connections but we are now typically getting between 3Mb/s and the maximum expected 5Mb/s (we're capping at this to share the full 10Mb/s more fairly). It is still likely that some local wireless links may not deliver as much as this and we will have to investigate on an individual basis.
• The BBC iPlayer service now recognises that we are in the UK and hence allows us access to the all the content.

Speed Tests

If you want to check out the speed of your new connection, R&SP runs its own local copy of speedtest at http://www.raspnet.co.uk/speedtest. This provides links to external speedtest sites so you can also test the speed of the new external link. The BBC's iPlayer provides an alternative speed test at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics.

Troubleshooting

The ordinary troubleshooting pages (steps 2 and 3) may help but remember to substitute 91.216.112 for 217.154.114 in all cases.