Broadband networking - help please

I am about to get broadband at long last, and the house we're moving to
has two rooms already connected by cable, with sockets in each of the two
rooms.

What I'd like to do is connect the 2 PCs in these 2 rooms by wire, but
use a laptop elsewhere in the house wirelessly.

The Belkin F5D7630 gets good reviews, and I like Belkin stuff. It would
appear to be the right piece of kit to do the job. Computeractive
recommends a BT Voyager for ease of setting up, and I'm torn between the
two.

Any suggestions or help in setting this system up from the experts in
here would be very welcome - all new to me. Many thanks.

"Peter P" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>I am about to get broadband at long last, and the house we're moving to
> has two rooms already connected by cable, with sockets in each of the two
> rooms.
>
> What I'd like to do is connect the 2 PCs in these 2 rooms by wire, but
> use a laptop elsewhere in the house wirelessly.
>
> The Belkin F5D7630 gets good reviews, and I like Belkin stuff. It would
> appear to be the right piece of kit to do the job. Computeractive
> recommends a BT Voyager for ease of setting up, and I'm torn between the
> two.
>
> Any suggestions or help in setting this system up from the experts in
> here would be very welcome - all new to me. Many thanks.

I have used the BT supplied router, both the wireless and the none
wireless, yes they are easy to setup, but a pain to do anything else
with.....
If it is adsl broadband you are wanting to share, i think you couldnt do
better then the 3com adsl wireless router on Dabs.com, with free wireless
laptop card, £58 inc vat, and about a £5 for the postage, i got mine next
day despite paying the cheap postage.

The 3com router has a good review on adslguide, i have found the wireless
range to be excellent, highly configurable, and once i updated the firmware
(a very easy and pain free process) found the reliabilty to be spot on. It
doesnt come with filters though, so be aware of that.

http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Produ...=3com%20router

Gaz

"Gaz" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:426add51$0$42329$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> "Peter P" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>>I am about to get broadband at long last, and the house we're moving to
>> has two rooms already connected by cable, with sockets in each of the two
>> rooms.
>>
>> What I'd like to do is connect the 2 PCs in these 2 rooms by wire, but
>> use a laptop elsewhere in the house wirelessly.
>>
>> The Belkin F5D7630 gets good reviews, and I like Belkin stuff. It would
>> appear to be the right piece of kit to do the job. Computeractive
>> recommends a BT Voyager for ease of setting up, and I'm torn between the
>> two.
>>
>> Any suggestions or help in setting this system up from the experts in
>> here would be very welcome - all new to me. Many thanks.
>
> I have used the BT supplied router, both the wireless and the none
> wireless, yes they are easy to setup, but a pain to do anything else
> with.....
> If it is adsl broadband you are wanting to share, i think you couldnt do
> better then the 3com adsl wireless router on Dabs.com, with free wireless
> laptop card, £58 inc vat, and about a £5 for the postage, i got mine next
> day despite paying the cheap postage.
>
> The 3com router has a good review on adslguide, i have found the wireless
> range to be excellent, highly configurable, and once i updated the
> firmware (a very easy and pain free process) found the reliabilty to be
> spot on. It doesnt come with filters though, so be aware of that.
>
> http://www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Produ...=3com%20router


And I can similarly recommend my Netgear DG834GT. It has a wizard that tries
various ADSL parameters and claims to set them automatically to the optimum
values so (in theory) you don't need to configure encapsulation, multiplex
type, VCI, VPI, MTU manually. The only parameter you need to set manually is
the username and password. I found that the wizard did its job well, though
I checked afterwards that all the parameters made sense. Optimising the MTU
size is a black art that I'm not very clued up on - my ISP (PlusNet) doesn't
even state what MTU it recommends, so I've stuck with the default of 1458.
Note that for AOL, you *must* set the MTU to 1400 - my router wouldn't
connect with 1458 when I tried it on a customer's line before buying them a
router of their own.

The range of the wireless is fairly good, though one thing I found out by
trial and error was that putting a wireless access point next to a huge
metal filing cabinet or a header tank of water (in the loft) does tend to
give large areas of "shadow". But once I'd switched my brain on, I realised
that these were not good places! The only disadvantage with combined
router/wireless is that you are constrained to have the wireless aerial in a
place that all the Ethernet cables and the phone line can reach the router.

My DG834GT cost £110 from DABS but that was with a Netgear WG111T USB
wireless adaptor included - useful as my laptop doesn't have a wireless
adaptor built-in.

I would suggest that for security reasons you connect one PC by wire while
you configure the wireless parameters (channel, WPA key etc), make sure that
a laptop can connect to the signal and only then (when security is enabled)
connect the rest of the PCs by cable: that way you are exposing the fewest
number of PCs to a hacker while the wireless network is insecure.

Usual wireless security tips apply:

- Set a WPA key with at least 20 characters - or at very least a WEP key of
128 bits.

- Turn off SSID broadcast (PCs will then need to quote the SSID to connect);
change the SSID to some value other than the default of Netgear, Linksys or
whatever.

- Turn on MAC address filtering so only PCs with listed MAC addresses can
connect.

Of these, the most important by far is the WPA key; the others just
discourage casual users of NetStumbler and can be circumvented by
experienced hackers. But even a few layers of deterrent may persuade hackers
to try for easier pickings.


My advice with wireless is: only use it if you have to. Even with a good
signal, you can sometimes get "lumpy" performance and occasional pauses or
even (more rarely) disconnections.

"Martin Underwood" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:426b91b3$0$83047$(E-Mail Removed)...
[snip]
> And I can similarly recommend my Netgear DG834GT. It has a wizard that
> tries various ADSL parameters and claims to set them automatically to the
> optimum values so (in theory) you don't need to configure encapsulation,
> multiplex type, VCI, VPI, MTU manually. The only parameter you need to
> set manually is the username and password.

This isn't a big advantage IMHO, as settings for most UK ISPs are the same;
most routers work "out of the box" after entering just the username and
password. But don't get me wrong - the DG834GT is a good router at a
reasonable price.

> Optimising the MTU size is a black art that I'm not very clued up on
> [...]

It's actually straightforward for most UK ISPs. Every packet (IP datagram)
has ten bytes of PPP overhead and is split into as many ATM cells as needed.
Each ATM cell has 53 bytes, of which five bytes are header. If the size
(packet + PPP overhead) is not a multiple of 48, the last cell will have
some wasted bytes.

Given this you can work out how many bytes are actually transmitted for a
given packet size, and hence the efficiency (useful bytes / transmitted
bytes). The most efficient size (that is less than or equal to the Ethernet
MTU of 1500) is 1478.

However, for sizes relatively close to this the difference is within a few
percent; for example, a one hour download is at best reduced to around 58
minutes. Furthermore, unless the MTU is set on the computer (rather than
just the router), it may even reduce performance on short-lived connections,
such as those used when browsing the web (though I doubt this would be
noticeable).

Alex

When I tried a Belkin product, the wireless performance was hopeless once
there were more than two walls to go through. Tried Linksys - and it was
much better.