Secondly, in a final frenzy of rage with Telkom ADSL, I purchased an Iburst account today. On Windows XP, the process was painless. A simple wizard from the installer on the CD, a nice little app telling me my bandwidth used, signal strength (abysmal), and so on, and I was racing away. Although perhaps that's not the right word to use with the speed I was getting – my first 9kbps modem gave me faster downloads.

On Kubuntu, the process was more painful, and not one I'd wish on an average user. It required hunting down and installing the correct driver (surely Iburst could include this on the CD), installing a new PPPOE dialer (as neither I nor anyone else I've come across could get the default one working), running a few make and make install commands (average users do this all the time, right?) and tweaking a few config files.