Modem/Router.. help

[Earl]

Okay I'm moving to my own house this year rather than halls of residence.

I have a Vista PC and a Macbook. I also have an airport extreme which I used at the halls as it connected straight into the network via ethernet and allowed me to save to my TB external usb hard drive over wifi with ease.

Anyway, I'm moving to the house and will need to connect up to a phone line. Is it as simple as getting an adsl modem to connect to my airport extreme? If so where do I get them? All the modems I have seen are the USB ones you get free from ISP's.

Or is it just easier to get a new router with adsl modem built in?

[nath]

The most straightforward way is to get yourself a wireless ADSL modem/router. A Netgear DG834G will do fine. However, I think you might use some of the airport extreme functionality such as hooking up to your TB USB HDD. The airport extreme could probably still work the same way if you hooked it up via ethernet or it's possible you can get it to connect as a client on the Netgear wireless network. I don't know so much about apple hardware so I can't advise so well on that specifically.

Anyway, get yourself a DG834G

[Earl]

Is this a good but cheap piece of kit I can recommend to non-geek friends too?

Seems silly but if we all want wifi we're probably going to have 6routers in one house. We each have a broadband connection in our room you see, but the broadband is slow so sharing would be terrible.

ps how does this compare to the Belkin FD57633 that I have at home and love? (Although I can't take it away with me to the new house unfortunately!)

[inactionman]

One problem you may get with 6x phone lines to one house is that BT have major problems with multiple customers at one address!

If there's 6 of you paying, have you thought about getting something like a 10 Meg business service?

[Cadelin]

Originally Posted by Earl

Is this a good but cheap piece of kit I can recommend to non-geek friends too?

Seems silly but if we all want wifi we're probably going to have 6routers in one house. We each have a broadband connection in our room you see, but the broadband is slow so sharing would be terrible.

ps how does this compare to the Belkin FD57633 that I have at home and love? (Although I can't take it away with me to the new house unfortunately!)

I think you are going to have to give us more detail about your situation. I have lived in a house with several other students, you certainly don't need 6 different contracts. Is this just a normal house or some university owned house with broadband access already installed?

My advice:
1) Find out what services are available in the area you will be living. You can do this here.
2) Choose a contract carefully, you probably want a 12 month contract and if there are 6 of you, you will need a heavy usage package (8MB+ connection speed with no download limit) maybe costing upto £50 a month but thats not expensive if you share it between 6 people.
3) Get a decent wireless router. If its a big house you don't want the signal to be crap in some of the bedrooms. Also some people may like to game online and a shit router will prevent that.

[Earl]

Its private rented accommodation . Broadband is provided and we don't have the 'luxury' of BT, unfortunately I'm stuck with Kingston Communications in Hull.

As I understand it there is already a line with telephone and broadband enabled in each of the 6 bedrooms. A look on the Karoo, aka Kingston Communications, website, shows that they are upgrading all connections to adsl2+, presumably that includes us.

So if we don't want to share our connections but want wireless we will have to purchase 6 routers right? I am the one charged with the task of finding equipment for people, but when its not my money I thought I best come here first. So is the DG834G a good value piece of kit that I can recommend to them, and of course get one myself.

[nath]

Sharing 6 connections could be a little tricky, not sure it'd be cost effective to do it. The DG834G is a great router though, very straight forward to set up but it means you'll have to have 6 separate ones for each connection. The alternative is to have one router and one connection and share it wirelessly, but that may end up being shit for performance.

[Earl]

Perhaps I should load balance the lot. 6x 24Mb.. Hmm!