Broadband and wireless

I am moving into a house with a friend who already lives there. She has already ordered broadband Internet with NTL, but she thinks it will be a cable connection, and I will need a wireless one. How do we go about getting a wireless connection? Would NTL just supply us with a router? Does it cost more? She has never used wireless before, and in my last flat, the wireless came as standard.

irlrobins

NTL sometimes provide a wireless router. It's up to the installer. I think if your PC is a distance from cable point they'll give you one. If not, any wireless router with a ethernet WAN port will work.

I'd personally recommend Linksys WRT54GL. It will work perfectly with NTL.

We've both got laptops, which can be used in the living room where the cable point is, but I'd like to use mine in my room which is upstairs without having 20 ft of cable to trip over. Might NTL give us a router for free? If not how much is the one you mentioned?

irlrobins

WEll just don't tell him you'll be using laptops in the cable room. Say you're always using it upstairs. See if that works.

Router is about 70-80e.

daymobrew

I had my ntl modem installed upstairs. The engineer added a splitter at the external ntl box and ran a wire outside the house to upstairs room (and drilled a hole through to the room).
I attached a WRT54G to the ntl modem and I can use my laptop anywhere in the house. This router also has 4 wired ports so you could both plug network cables into the back of it and use it simultaneously. The wireless portion can support tons of simultaneous connections (default is 50 AFAIK; I set mine to 5 and enabled WEP and MAC filtering).

Aside: the 'SpeedBooster' part of the above router is a Linksys-only feature and only works if the wireless cards in your laptops support SpeedBooster technology. I wouldn't worry about it - it'll be fast more than enough because the 'bottleneck' is the ntl network.