Wire free house

[SBD]

Hi people,

I've tried seraching through old threads and it's not that I can't find anything more that I can't understand it after the first few lines. Bit of a techno gimp you see
I'm lucky enough that work have just bunged me a new laptop both Blue Tooth and WiFi (?) compatable. what i would like to do is set up home so that I could sit in the bath for example and log onto the net without trailing yards of cable from a 'phone socket. Had a somewhat brief discussion with technical guy at work who was very honest and said he wasn't sure but thought it would mean having to use a PC as a server and then LAN from that which seems excessive?
I'm begining to lose myself here - told you I was a gimp
If anyone has the time to explain/help it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Plotloss]

If you have DSL you could use a wireless broadband router...

[SBD]

Nope just bog standard BT at the mo. Under previous owners the house was broadband through cable, trying to avoid the cost of this but suspect may end up having to do it this way as have heard this as a solution.

[brumster]

If all you've got is the wireless laptop and a dial-up BT account then your friend is right, you'd either need a dial-up wireless router (rare, probably expensive) or else a PC with a wireless adapter, running Windows Internet Connection Sharing (hardly worth shelling out for another PC just to act as a router).

The easier option *if* you have broadband/ADSL is the wireless router option, as suggested above.

Do you have a spare PC already?

[arcturus]

If you don't have a spare PC to act as the gateway, then look at the Netgear FWG114P wireless router/firewall/switch/printserver. It's around £130 and has an ethernet port to plug in to a broadband modem but also a serial port to plug into an external ISDN or analogue modem as well.

You would also have the protection of a firewall and a place to plug a printer in.

Installed one for a client recently and it works really well.

[SBD]

Thanks guys top stuff. As I understand I essentially have 3 options use a PC (got a crappy old one but the ex is taking it in exchange for me keeping all the power tools ), get broadband put in ('bout £25/month round us) or use the Netgear hub as above.
TBH as I don't want to put broadband in yet I think Netgear is the way to go, especially as I can probably blag work into paying for it

Once again many thanks people very much appreciated.

[stevieb]

SBD said:

Thanks guys top stuff. As I understand I essentially have 3 options use a PC (got a crappy old one but the ex is taking it in exchange for me keeping all the power tools ), get broadband put in ('bout £25/month round us) or use the Netgear hub as above. TBH as I don't want to put broadband in yet I think Netgear is the way to go, especially as I can probably blag work into paying for it Once again many thanks people very much appreciated.

You dont have to spend 25 a month you can get it as cheap as £12 a month

steve

[johnp68]

I thought that £25 pm was about the cheapest, unless you go for the slower versions of broadband. I'd be interested to hear about any company's offering full-speed broadband for less than £25 pm.

[squirrelz]

www.plus.net

£18.99 for 512K ADSL, but they block P2P traffic and binary newsgroups on that
£21.99 for 512K ADSL, with no such restrictions.

There are some options for <512K and >512K as well.

[squirrelz]

www.nildram.co.uk

£22.99 for 512K ADSL - very highly rated too.
They have a number of options for additional features on the service (extra IP addresses, domains, etc).