A wee tip for you ... when your Sky Box and Broadband Access Point are far apart...

rozeboosje · 22-11-2013 11:49PM #1

Don't throw out your old WiFi router when you get your fast fibre broadband. It can still come in handy.

For example, my old 3mbps broadband ran quite happily on a Billion modem and a LinkSys WRT54GS wireless router. The Billion is pretty useless at this stage; it's an old style broadband modem and it doesn't do WiFi.

Not so my WRT54GS though, and that's why I'm posting this thread. My phone access point, and hence my shiny new modem, are located near my front door. My Sky box is in the middle of the sitting room. As you know, Sky are doing this "on demand" thing, but you either need to connect it to your modem by a LAN wire - and I'll be damned if I'm going to lay several meters of LAN cable from my front door to my Sky box, OR you need a handy little WiFi connection box that Sky are only too happy to sell to you. Well darn that for a game of soldiers!

Did a bit of Google Fu, and discovered it was not hard - if you're willing and able to read instructions VERY carefully and set aside an hour or two to follow them meticulously so as to avoid turning your Router into a useless "brick" - I repeat NOT hard to apply a firmware upgrade to the WRT54GS and turn it into a Repeater. And now my Sky box is plugged into my old WRT54GS, my WRT54GS is a repeater for my shiny new Fibre modem, and I don't have unsightly wires going across my living room. Happy days.

Waste not, want not and all that jazz.... :-)

Like I said earlier, my Billion modem is of no use to me; it has no wireless capability so I couldn't even use it as a repeater. But it might come in handy for someone who expects to remain on the "old style" broadband for the forseeable future, who doesn't mind working "wired" (i.e. using a LAN cable to their modem) and whose own modem has given up the ghost. I'd hate to throw a working piece of kit into the bin just because *I* no longer have a use for it.

amdaley28 · 23-11-2013 01:59AM

Another way is to use something like this and use the house wiring.
http://www.dabs.ie/products/trendnet-powerline-500-av-nano-adapter-kit-8KC8.html?src=2
Dead easy to set up.Just stick one in a socket near you router & connect up with the supplied Ethernet cable. Put the 2nd plug in a socket near your Sky box & again connect to the Sky box with the supplied Ethernet cable.
I have them around the house & they are solid every time with no need for wiring all over the floor and no worry about wireless signals going through walls etc.

rozeboosje · 23-11-2013 11:53AM

Excellent. I was just happy to be able to find a new use for a working piece of equipment that I would otherwise just have discarded...

smee again · 23-11-2013 12:08PM

Do a search in here about wireless repeaters, it's come up here plenty of times. By repeating you've just halved the speed of your wireless network. Worse than that, you've just added one that only does wireless "g" pulling your network back to half of "g" speeds

rozeboosje · 23-11-2013 12:51PM

Hi "smee" - Yes, that's right. It ain't the fastest. But it's fast enough for "Sky on Demand" which is all I'll ever be putting through that router. The rest of my equipment goes straight to the source. I'm thrifty, not stupid XD

smee again · 23-11-2013 02:50PM

rozeboosje wrote: »

Hi "smee" - Yes, that's right. It ain't the fastest. But it's fast enough for "Sky on Demand" which is all I'll ever be putting through that router. The rest of my equipment goes straight to the source. I'm thrifty, not stupid XD

You don't understand, it slows your existing wifi, just by being there continuously talking to it and forces your new shiny wireless "n" modem to run in "g" mode when it can run much faster "n". To have an "n" network every device need to be "n" capable otherwise you fall back to "g". Some even disable "g" to have "n" only

You've just reduced your network from "n" to half the speeds of "g"

rozeboosje · 23-11-2013 03:32PM

Ok. So I check my wireless connection speed on this laptop and it tells me it's at 144.0Mbps - how can that be if my old wireless router should, according to your comment, drag the whole lot down to 54Mbps?

rozeboosje · 23-11-2013 03:35PM

... and I connect to the Repeater and now my wifi connection tells me it's at 54Mpbs as expected.

Hm.

smee again · 23-11-2013 03:52PM

rozeboosje wrote: »

Ok. So I check my wireless connection speed on this laptop and it tells me it's at 144.0Mbps - how can that be if my old wireless router should, according to your comment, drag the whole lot down to 54Mbps?

No, don't heed the speed of the interface, the laptop will show as connecting as "n" speeds as you have "n" enabled. I'm talking about actual throughput, what the network is capable of. Stream some content from Sky on demand and try to watch a youtube video or do a speedtest at the same time. The whole world is upgrading their routers for faster speeds, more throughput, you've just halved yours by not understanding the technology.

Wireless is half duplex, it can only transmit or receive, not both at the same time. A cable has separate pairs of strands for transmit and receive, wireless must use the same frequency, therefore it must stop sending to receive. Then add a repeater using this same frequency to send and receive. Now understand that nearly all data transfer is two way traffic, packets are sent in batches (TCP windowing) and more are not sent until an acknowledgement is received back, therefore it is much less efficient than running cables and much worse when you add a repeater.

As mentioned above, get a set of homeplugs, these should give you decent speeds and won't affect your wireless. Repeaters are never a good option unless all you want to do is browse

rozeboosje · 23-11-2013 04:22PM

Gotcha. ok, well, I guess it'll do until after Christmas, then I might pick up a better solution in the January sales [grin]

Mc Love · 24-11-2013 07:28AM

amdaley28 wrote: »

Another way is to use something like this and use the house wiring.
http://www.dabs.ie/products/trendnet-powerline-500-av-nano-adapter-kit-8KC8.html?src=2
Dead easy to set up.Just stick one in a socket near you router & connect up with the supplied Ethernet cable. Put the 2nd plug in a socket near your Sky box & again connect to the Sky box with the supplied Ethernet cable.
I have them around the house & they are solid every time with no need for wiring all over the floor and no worry about wireless signals going through walls etc.

Have a wifi repeater and the powerline adapters - and they work extremely well

smee again · 24-11-2013 10:45AM

Mc Love wrote: »

Have a wifi repeater and the powerline adapters - and they work extremely well

You most likely have a wireless access point, a repeater receives it's signal by wireless, an access point recieves it's signal by another method which means it doesn't suffer the same drawbacks. You must make sure it's set to use a channel well away from the original or it will interfere. You can even set it to the same name and password as your original and your devices will roam.

rozeboosje · 13-12-2013 06:19PM

*snicker*

Well guess what. Less than a couple of weeks after I posted this I receive a little leaflet from Sky. They want to give me "a present", i.e. their little wireless 802.11n enabled boxything. It arrived today. That retired my old 802.11g LinkSys router though I might leave it in the conservatory for that fine summer's day when I might decide to sit right at the bottom of the garden .... er.... yeah. Whatever LOL

Anyhoo. I unpacked it and I nearly shat myself laughing. It came with a LAN cable to connect the Wireless Connector to the Sky box... which was about a foot long. Tough luck if your sky box happens to be neatly hidden away in a press or something. Thankfully I had a few old LAN cables lying around but.... geez. They send you a new gadget worth a tenner or two, FOR NOWT, and then they try to save 10 cent on the length of a cable. LULZ

Oh yeah and that's not all. I plugged the thing in and it duly reported that a wireless connection had been discovered. It discovered my network (yay!) and reported that I had to enter the network key. With the remote. Which is a pain in the proverbial at the best of times. But hilarity ensued when I got to the point in my password where I'm using a symbol.... whoops. You can only input letters and numbers.

Thankfully both the wireless connector and my modem are WPS enabled but... [giggles]

melekalikimaka · 13-12-2013 06:24PM

your use of brackets and stars to express laughter and other noises amuses me...

rozeboosje · 13-12-2013 06:30PM

It's an old habit... Sorry

Topbike77 · 13-12-2013 10:26PM

I actually don't have my Sky HD box hooked up to the internet. What are the advantages of doing it? and would it slow down your internet speed?

rozeboosje · 13-12-2013 10:49PM

When you hook it up to t'internet you get access to "Sky on Demand".

Basically what that means is that there is stuff there, depending on what package you're on, that you can download to your sky box and watch whenever you like.

If you're the kind of person who likes box sets this may be of interest to you. Nice thing is that it's included in the price of your Sky package, you don't pay a penny extra for it. And now they give you the little wireless connector for free, too - you used to have to buy that off Sky. It wasn't very expensive but I couldn't be arsed. Then I found I could configure my old router as a repeater and I got it working, and now Sky have actually sent me the wireless connector for free.

I don't think it'll slow down your internet, but you need to be careful you don't have a capped broadband package and, of course, during a download anything else connecting to the internet at the same time may notice a slowdown, especially if you're not on a fibre package.

That's my guess, anyway.

Topbike77 · 13-12-2013 10:54PM

rozeboosje wrote: »

When you hook it up to t'internet you get access to "Sky on Demand".

Basically what that means is that there is stuff there, depending on what package you're on, that you can download to your sky box and watch whenever you like.

If you're the kind of person who likes box sets this may be of interest to you. Nice thing is that it's included in the price of your Sky package, you don't pay a penny extra for it. And now they give you the little wireless connector for free, too - you used to have to buy that off Sky. It wasn't very expensive but I couldn't be arsed. Then I found I could configure my old router as a repeater and I got it working, and now Sky have actually sent me the wireless connector for free.

I don't think it'll slow down your internet, but you need to be careful you don't have a capped broadband package and, of course, during a download anything else connecting to the internet at the same time may notice a slowdown, especially if you're not on a fibre package.

That's my guess, anyway.

Cheers! I was wondering why nothing why showing up under the on demand section, silly me! It actually looks like something I would use.
Looks like the connector costs €12.99 now http://www.sky.com/ireland/tv/on-demand-connector/ I might ring them up and ask if they can send me one.

rozeboosje · 14-12-2013 12:15PM

Why pay 12.99 if they are giving them out for free, now? And I don't think our subscription is anything special. We have the bare minimum. Just phone them up and tell them you heard they are giving away the connectors for free now and could you have one please and thank you. At most you may have to sit through a few minutes in which they remind you of all sorts of other lovely additions to your package, but all you have to do there is politely decline all of those :-)

A wee tip for you ... when your Sky Box and Broadband Access Point are far apart...

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