silent running

Need some techy help on this one. I've got an old BT Hub connected to my desktop PC with a plain old (i.e. works first time without any setup hassles!) ethernet cable. I've got a wireless laptop that seems to work OK in some parts of the house with this same Hub, but I don't use it a lot tbh.

Now BT rang me up the other day telling me I could have a discount on my BT Broadband Option 1 or whatever they called it. All I know is it's the cheapest one they do and it suited me fine. Anyway, they said I could have it for £3 a month less because I'd been with them so long. Sounds OK I thought, until they started on about some BT Vision thing that I could have free as well as long as I had an aerial. I'm not a big telly watcher and we only have one telly, the opposite end of the house from the PC and broadband Hub.

From what I can work out, I'll end up having to put a new 'Home Hub' and 'V-Box' near the telly, meaning I can't use my perfectly good old Hub near the PC. Then, unless I want to run an ethernet cable from one end of the house to the other, I'll need to put a wireless card in my PC and I haven't even got room for one. And I'm dubious over whether a wireless connection even has the kind of decent throughput that a proper wired ethernet connection does. Plus I just don't trust wireless anyway.

Any opinions welcome. Being as I don't watch a lot of telly anyway, and already have a perfectly good telly with built in freeview, could I just flog all the BT equipment on ebay and stick with the old Hub I've already got?

silent running

Anyone?

Silver Scooby Sport

iTrader: (15)

Right I can help with some info on this one

Check this out first...

BT Vision

I'm running the hub and phone on option 3 here.... I've got it set up next to my pc and it's plugged in by ethernet... I don't want to go wireless either.

I've been looking at the Vision box for a while now along with a mate of mine in work who want's one... like me he does not want to go wireless, the box was only available as engineer install for £100 up until recently but now I have ordered one for £30 as a self-install with the idea of running a long ethernet cable from the hub the the box next to the TV in order not to have to relocate the hub next to the TV ( with me so far ? ) well my mates arrived yesterday and you don't need to run cables or go wireless for it it appears to have some fancy electric plugs so when you plug it in the mains you also plug an ethernet cable into that socket as well and some who the signal piggy bags the main cable from vision to phone hub you plug one on the box socket and one on the hub socket.

Here's a scan of the gear sent with the hub...



So for £30 I'm getting a freeview box along with some subscription channels but what interests me is it's a hard drive recorder for 80 hours of TV plus you can pause live TV also you can watch one and record another.

Some info on the plugs..

Comtrend - IPTV Set Top Box,Digital Signage box,GPON,VoIP Gateway,IAD,ADSL2+ / VDSL2 Multi-DSL Router,Bonded Router

Looks like you can network your home over the mains with these.

Hope that helps
Mine's being delivered Monday so I'll give you an update

Simon

Dracoro

Just get a USB wireless dongle (BT may give you one free), plug into PC and bob's your uncle.

Why don't you 'trust' wireless? Simply set up the encryption (easy to do) to WEP or WPA and away you go.

BT vision is not wireless (yet) so it has to be wired to the home hub so they need to be close together (unless you buy a long ethernet cable).

Can't grumble though as it sounds like you've got a half decent 160GB twin tuner PVR with downloadable films/tv on top. All for NOTHING!!!

silent running

That all makes total sense now. Many thanks for the replies. I think my solution will be - as I have the aerial and a spare phone socket in the living room near my TV, and as the VBox will basically be working more as a hard disk recorder than anything else - I'll put the whole lot in the living room. I've resigned myself to using a USB wireless dongle thing and see if it works.

Dracoro- when I say I don't trust wireless, I mean I'm very old school with things like that, whether it's hooking up synths to drum machines to sequencers or a PC to a broadband router, I just like to see the wires so I know what's going where. It's not so much the security of wireless that worries me, it's the fact that my experience of wireless is that it's a pain in the **** to set up and doesn't always work properly, whereas an ethernet cable is inherently secure and working - it's either plugged in or it's not!

But I guess I need to move with the times. Although I like that idea of using the ring main as a network...if the wireless USB thing doesn't work, I'll definitely look into mains networking.