BT Infinity cabling

I will be signing up to Infinity at the end of the month and gather that either the home hub or modem need to be connected to my PC via Ethernet in order to get the max speed and that the engineer will need to do this in order to 'complete' the job.
I don't agree with BT that running cables 'neatly' around skirtings and door frames is an acceptable installation but my PC is upstairs so I'll be running my own prior to the visit.
My questions are -
What cable and plugs will be needed?
Does it matter where the home hub goes? Next to PC upstairs or Down with the Modem?
My wife has a Wireless g card in her laptop. I have Wireless n on my PC as an option. If we both connect wirelessly, is it true that the speed will default to the slower g speed?
Could I just get the engineer run the cable but not fix it so that I can install a cable at a later date? I'm thinking just in case I find that the wireless side of things is actually OK and there is no need to run a cable.

I think that's it.

Thanks

Hello

Just ethernet leads between the 2.

I get the full 37.5Mbs on a good speed test on wireless so that is ok if wireless n.

Sisters wireless card on the laptop only gave about 16Mbs when the minute before I could do the full wack.

Try what I say here and replace the wireless card in the wifes computer. Wireless G was ok for sister when quality 4.5mbs broadband from orange, rubbish and sure the line lengt should have done more. Not that far from downtown exchange.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/f/4088667-s...

Just made the computer run on wireless G by going into the settings on the wifi card in control panel, hardware. That now shows up as 54Mbs connection, as it would if good signal. Speedtest is 20 something.

Phone connected at 72Mbs so that is normal so I think the HH3 will do both ok at the same time but wife machine will never do the good infinity speed.

Wirless card are cheap enough on ebay if you have that.

What I did in readyness for sister at her house. Same size and make of card, like on the other posting just the better n one.

What I think but no expert, bound to be proven wrong!.

Still phone downloads normal speed when computer is forced to g standard so thing router will do both at same time but rubbish G card, a no i think by my experiments with what I have.

I don't agree with BT that running cables 'neatly' around skirtings and door frames is an acceptable installation but my PC is upstairs so I'll be running my own prior to the visit.
My questions are -
What cable and plugs will be needed?

Where is your master socket ? If there are two power points next to it, happy days. Run an ethernet cable from your PC down to the master socket, that way you can either have the feed from the modem to the router upstairs, or have both downstairs and use the cable just to feed your PC via the ethernet. I'd base the routers location one where it provides the best wireless coverage in the hose.

A rubber hose would be OK, but a metal hose could cause signal problems.

Wireless from the hub is not brilliant even with N cards. Ethernet is superb though. The usual advice is to place the hub centrally in the house if all floors are to get wireless but often this is not practical. Because my line comes in upstairs and the hub is there, wireless is very poor downstairs. The bottom line is that ethernet is by far the best option if you want top speed - I use the Gbit port on the hub but not all computers can benefit from that. After much experimentation I've found the Belkin N dongles give the best wireless speeds, (but DON'T install their dreadful CD with so-called management software.)

Or. forget wireless rubbish and use Homeplugs

(for stationary pc's and laptops obviously)

Edited by deleted (Wed 14-Mar-12 10:58:02)

Thanks for the help and info people.
Homeplugs could be an option. Is there any speed decrease compared to Ethernet?

My Master socket is in the front room next to a double power socket. My Be Router is there at the moment and I'm getting good wifi coverage throughout my tiny little house and down to my garage at the bottom of the garden.

What about the option of the engineer running a temporary cable so I can decide whether it's actually worth making it permanent at a later date?

I'm not an expert.. but i believe they achieve almost all of the speed of ethernet.

In reply to a post by Moradin:

I'm not an expert.. but i believe they achieve almost all of the speed of ethernet.

No way ...

I can have 8 devices here, with four of them copying files from te other four and on my Ethernet cabling I will get 1Gbps for each connection and so I would see 4Gbps being transferred. And at distances of over 100 feet.

Homeplugs get worse over distance, the throughput is never fully achieved and the sum achieved is likely to be well under 100Mbps - well short of what an Ethernet connection can achieve.

I've not seen any benchmarks for the newer devices that claim faster speeds, but for the 85MBit/sec models I'm lead to believe that 30-to-40Mbit/sec is the common top stable speed. The further devices are apart the lower the speed you'll get of course, and every thing you have plugged in has potential to cause interference that will drop the speed further.

The 40Mbit-or-a-little-more those tests saw with good quality wiring with no unusually noisy devices plugged in would be find for Internet use, unless you are lucky enough to get more the 40mbit by some means, and is faster than most people see on wireless (even N).

Your "multiple machines all transferring data at the same time" probably isn't a fair comparison though. Your "proper" ethernet will probably be a switched full-duplex segment so active streams between distinct machines will not interfere with each other (there will be no packet send collisions so machine 1 talking to machine 2 won't interfere with machine 3 talking to machine 4, and both transfers might see the full 100Mbit/s or 1Gbit/s), but with powerline adaptors what you have is a non-switched segment (just like wireless) so the total rate is shared and any device talking to any other device potentially interferes with every other device due to packet collisions so contention with multiple machines will bring the total rate observed down quite rapidly (if machine 1 talking to machine 2 gets 40Mbit/s with nothing else going on then with bulk transfers M1->M2 and M3->M4 your will likely see significantly less than 40Mbit/s in total).

I was using that to show that the plugs will can no way achieve what Ethernet does. Put more than the switch and one PC on there and a time the bandwidth will be split ... Even a single PC on Ethernet can achieve 1Gbps which is well above and that is eniogh to disprove teh comment that plugs get near ...

So I had my Infinity installed yesterday and the first thing I asked was about was routing the Ethernet cable.
OR engineer looked at me blankly and asked me what I was asking for and haven't I got wireless, and that he had no Ethernet cable on board.
So I was set up for wireless but have 15m of Cat5 on order because the even though I have a stable wireless n connection, it's a bit up and down.

Don't know how to add images here.
http://speedtest.net/result/1865999830.png
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13331...

Why is the thinkbroadband speed test result roughly half the speedtest result?

Correct, engineers do not supply Ethernet cable. A short one should have arrived with the Home Hub 3 (yellow) when with BT Infinity.

Longer ones are for you to source

speedtest.net, does sampling and drops the slowest 20, and fastest 10, and returns the best remaining sample. Thus more likely to show a peak speed.

We do an average across time, so if the PC is slow to do a TCP ramp it can affect ours, as also can variable speeds from the provider.

speedtest.net good for pub bragging
thinkbroadband.com good for knowing what non HTTP downloads will be like

Traffic management has a tendency to impact our test as its not HTTP based.

Thanks, The cabling issue wasn't a problem, I was just under the impression that they would supply and fit some. I thought their policy was to connect one computer by cable so as to achieve the advertised speed.

Re my speedtest result. The thinkbroadband one was done with my wifes laptop connected and she only has a g standard wifi card at the moment.
Th speedtest.net one was done last night on my wireless connection when my wifes laptop was switched off.

Their policy is to get one PC connected and working wired if you have some or wireless if you don't.

Only the speedtest on this site can be displayed as an image