VM w/ Homeplugs & Wireless setup - confused!

Hi,

I'm new to the forum and hope someone can help me. I've been reading up previous forum posts for the past couple hours and still can't get my head around something.

I'm a 2nd year uni student, about to move in to our shared house of 6 people. We're going to be subscribing to Virgin Media XXL 50MB fibre optic broadband.

What I'm wondering is:

Can I buy a pair of homeplugs, one coming from the Virgin media router (or modem?), and the other plugged in to my room and into my laptop via ethernet? This is so I can get as fast a speed as possible without upgrading my laptop to Wireless N... I'm now left wondering whether everyone else in the house (5 others!!!) need a homeplug to be able to surf the net (which they wouldn't be very happy with), or can they just surf via wifi from the router as normal? If not, what would I need to buy so that they can resume surfing via wifi, while I get to use homeplug?

Basically, can there be a combination of wifi and homeplugs or does it have to be one or the other?

Cheers

You can use a combination of "thru the mains" and wireless connectivity without problem. You will of course require a wireless enabled cable router rather than a modem but I believe that these are now standard issue with Virgin.

Certainly you can mix and match but in fact, if there are 5 of them all using wireless they would probably have quite a bit of packet clashing (only one radio device can transmit at once).

Half using Homeplugs would at least diversify the packet clashes (but affect you, so best not to tell them!). I suppose if you want to 'play fair' you could go for the 14 Mbps units rather than the 85 Mbps ones, but the 85 were cheaper last time I looked.

Back to your comment on upgrading laptop, the max that would be possible would be 50 Mbps from Virgin, so no benefit in using higher than 54 Mbps (802.11g) anyway, and those cards can be had fairly cheaply, compared with 2x Homeplug, but you'd suffer the wireless channel sharing of course!

In reply to a post by ultra:

Certainly you can mix and match but in fact, if there are 5 of them all using wireless they would probably have quite a bit of packet clashing (only one radio device can transmit at once).

Just to say we've had up to 10 laptops running running on wi-fi all day (for workshops) and it's really not a problem - as long as you have the broadband bandwidth for the content you want to access.

If you get a dual-band router which supports a/b/g/n this will be even less of a problem.

Based on real use experience this cable router Linksys WRT610N works nicely providing gigiabit LAN, wifi and USB port if you want to to connect an external hard drive / flash drive for shared storage/media.

Not the cheapest router - but divided between six well worth it.

Don't forget a 10-20m CAT6 cable should cost no more than £5 and you can run that round the skirting boards if you need to.

Edited by prlzx (Tue 18-Aug-09 22:15:38)

OK, I'll take your word for it regarding the use by multiple wi-fi users... though I could still imagine problems if several of them tried peer-to-peer at once, and thus had dozens of connections in play, per laptop (tbh, don't know if it uses TCP or UDP, but if the latter, then it might give some problems).

Anyway, the OP won't be touching wi-fi so not his problem (and I'm not sure if he'd want to put up cash towards a more expensive wi-fi router if he's not using wireless.

Why would they need cat6 cable? Not as if there's any advantage to using that to VM cable box, is there, and the other people plan to use wi-fi from what I read earlier - nothing permanent to annoy the landlord, and many prefer wi-fi (not me, personally).

802.11g limits a 50Mbps virgin cable connection to around 23Mbps. WHY?

802.11g is 54Mbps, but that is 27 Meg down and 27 Meg up, and once you allow for overheads around 23Meg is the best you can get, and some kit struggles to hit 20Meg.

Hence why Virgin ship a N router that should in theory cope.

In reply to a post by ultra:

...Anyway, the OP won't be touching wi-fi so not his problem (and I'm not sure if he'd want to put up cash towards a more expensive wi-fi router if he's not using wireless.

Why would they need cat6 cable? Not as if there's any advantage to using that to VM cable box, is there, and the other people plan to use wi-fi from what I read earlier...

Not wanting to speak for the OP but I got the impression he was avoiding upgrading wi-fi to get the highest speed on downloads.

If the laptop has a/g that would still be fine for the convenience of not being tied to a fixed point for general usage and can always plugin ethernet to do a large download.

They may still be ok with 6 if the router does dual band as they can divide themselves between the 2.4 and 5GHz bands (subject to Andrew's commment naturally).

I'm assuming they all know each other - they are already sharing the cost of the broadband- so they might have something in the lounge that can usefully sit on the network too (e.g. for shared media).

Remembering that some PVRs and even TVs come with ethernet now, I mentioned gigabit if they want to share stuff digitally.

I only suggested a known good wi-fi router as the OP was already considering investing in homeplugs and I hadn't remembered that Virgin already supply an N router on that package.

I didn't think Cat 6/5e/5 differ significantly in price these day and it can still be done as a non-permanent fixing (tuck it round the carpet edges) or white cable along skirting (e.g. white tack or small self-adhesive cable ties).

Edited by prlzx (Tue 18-Aug-09 23:18:14)

Well, you live and learn - I had not been aware that you didn't get the quoted speed in each direction!

Yet another reason not to touch wireless, in my view (ignoring security and the testing/debug issues). Personally I've used cable since the mid-80s for anything to do with ethernet (at that time, 10 Mbps with BNCs and terminators, or, at work, thick 'orange' coax and vampire taps). Most of my clients have tried and had problems with wireless (down to size of property, thicker walls, and so on) but happily use Homeplugs!

Ethernet cabling can vary in price depending on where you buy.

Got the remains of a 100m drum of outdoor stuff here, bought from http://www.dcdi.co.uk/ only mentioning as fast delivery and does what seem like reasonable patch cables for a decent price

Ran it down outside property from loft room to lounge, 3 things needing Ethernet under TV, so was time to stop using the home plugs.