Bringing my Mac to Taipei - ISP?

Life Technology
1

I’ll be bringing my Powerbook, and possibly a new iMac to Taipei this summer. Any Mac enthusiasts out there have advice on ISP’s? Are there cable modems? Or just ADSL? Do certain companies have more experience with Macs?

thanks in advance,

Duffy

2

I would recommend getting ADSL and an IP sharing box with a built-in hub. You will see some special ADSL deals on your phone bill. The IP sharing box will automatically dialup for you so that you will have permanent Internet connections for all your computers. Most IP sharing boxes will also have firewall features. From there, you set your MAC to use DHCP. This will free you from using their Chinese dialup software and poor technical assistance.

3

Hi Duffy,

It is under a lot of dust, but I remember having a similar disscussion about Macs a while back. You can find it here:

http://oriented.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=000058&p=

Hope this helps.

Jeremy

4

If you are using dial-up access you will have few problems.

ADSL is a sightly different story. If you are using Mac OS 9 you must install “Enternet” to establish a PPoE connection. “Enternet” is not the slickest system level software around and we have found a number of stability issues with it. Under 9.2.2 it simply doesn’t work (most of the time it will not allow the os to boot as it crashes when networking is loading). I think Apple updated Open Transport with the latest OS update and “Enternet” for MacOS is not being updated.

Anyway, if you use OS X the connection is fine and seemless as it has PPoE built in.

Other than this your experience will be no different than your PC bethren. Don’t expect any help from customer service though.

There was another thread in this forum which I think concluded with a recommendation of either HiNet or Sparq as a ADSL ISP. I use HiNet and its fine - the web is so slow in Taiwan that the difference between the two would be negligible.