Tele2 a UK company offers Wireless symmetrical DSL for residential users, which provides a permanent Internet connection with speeds upto 150kbps for 10 pounds per month. Although not as high as the bandwidth stated for ADSL over the phone lines, its not a contested link, so the actual performance is much better. Tele2 has the license to provide the service throughout the UK, but at present its only available in particular regions, Reading, Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham and Leicester, although they will be expanding the cover soon. Much higher speeds are available for the business installations, however the price also goes up!

The installation at my home, was a painless affair, and starts with a site survey. They had two possible base stations visible from the house, one on the television repeater mast at Idle and the other at Dudley. My house is perched at the top of a valley near Queensbury overlooking Bradford, and on a good day I can see the Idle mast, so I suggested they tried that first. He took a GPS reading and informed me that the house is 850 feet above sea level, with the amount of snow we get during the winter I wasn't too surprised! The site survey consists of one guy up a ladder holding a portable dish on a pole and the other looking at the error rate on a laptop. The guy up the ladder can see the signal strength on a set of leds under the square dish, and as soon as he pointed the dish in the general direction of Idle, all of them lit up, 'No problem here mate', he said. The other engineer looking at the laptop, press a few keys, and just said 'install'. Then like a keyword command they all suddenly sprang into life.

The square dish has been installed on the side of the house, just level to the gutter to shield it against the wind, and terminated into a small box called a 'speedbox' which is 3x5 inches, and took about half an hour to complete. To test the line they download a test 2MB file from tele2, it took 23 seconds to download (~86kbps). They leave you an ip address, subnet mask, default gateway, two dns addresses, a host name (in my case aria) which gives me the domain name aria.tele2.co.uk and web address http://www.aria.tele2.co.uk. Although I will be continuing to use the excellent service from uklinux.net for web space and email facilities.

The tele2 website www.tele2.co.uk has a customer support section and your supplied with a password to access it, however it doesn't offer any advice for linux users, only windows and macs, and that was very sparse. The only thing they ask is that you keep the speedbox switched on at all times, so they can perform remote diagnosis and upgrades.