Using existing ADSL from an alternative location

Hi,

Forgive me if this is a dumb question.

I have Zen 8000 Pro at home. I'm at someone else's house for a few days, and I have brought my modem / router with me. Their phone line is ADSL-enabled (I know this, as they have PIPEX ADSL running on it). They are on a different BT exchange from me.

My Zen package is faster and nicer then my friend's PIPEX one, so what I'd really like to do is to just plug my modem / router into their phone line, have it log in to my Zen account, and use my lovely whizzy Zen setup from here.

However, it doesn't seem to work.... authentication appears to fail.

Am I being a complete dufus? Is this in fact possible?

Not possible!

And how did you think you would get a better speed?

Why not just use their login on that line?

Better speed because I have an 8MB package and theirs is a lowly 2MB.

We're using their package now...

Sorry; I also forgot to say thanks for the prompt response, MHC :-)

It's odd, when you think about it. If your ADSL account is tied to your phone line -- which I guess is the implication -- then why have login details at all? Surely your phone line is enough to uniquely identify you, in that case? Hmmmm.

I guess I'll have to put up with 2 meg broadband until I get home!

You could, if you have access to your friends login details, substitute your router with whatever you friend uses and then enter his/hers username and password, which should then authenticate if all else is equal VPI/VCI etc.

Seems to be a bit long winded though.

Post deleted by gomezz

This is actually what I've ended up doing. She has a USB modem, so to get 2 PCs running we needed the router anyway...

Just a shame I can't use my Zen account from here and get the 8 meg :-(

The line is associated with the "domain" for the ISP. So, Zen has it's own domain, Pipex has one, etc, etc. This allows BT to control which ISP is allocated to a line. The username/password is then used to uniquely identify you to the ISP (who, as far as I know, have no way of knowing which line an ADSL connection comes from).

This has been the way BT approached things from the start. I'm not sure as to why them did this except that it gives a level of control. Might have been because BT didn't use usernames at the start (don't know if they do now) and so if they didn't have this service restriction capability then it would have been more difficult for them to control things.

Your friends line being 2Mb is quite possibly to do with the line capabilities in which case even if you could use your ID it wouldn't necessarily give you any better speed on the connection, but that's a whole different story.

In reply to:

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Might have been because BT didn't use usernames at the start (don't know if they do now)

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It's the other way round, they used to use usernames and passwords for the original BT Openworld stuff, but now no longer do with BT Broadband.

Ah right, knew they hadn't at some point.

But, without their service selection barring it would be difficult to see how they could run the network without usernames... Maybe they always planned for that possibility?