How to make my pc wireless?

Bernard-Shakey

Bernard-Shakey

Bernard-Shakey

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Joined
18 Nov 2005
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26
Location
Aberdeen, Scotland
I am lucky enough to be upgrading my broadband to a fibre connection, but the master telephone socket is not in the same room as my pc, and because I don't want a cat 5 cable running along any walls in the house, I will have to make my pc into a wireless pc.
Is it as simple as fitting a wifi card to my PC, or are there other things that I need to take into consideration, with relation to it being a fibre connection as opposed to ADSL?
Are there any disadvantages to a purely wireless connection?

Thanks in advance

Dave
 
Superb info, thanks very much. This seems like the perfect option/solution.

Would i need any higer that 200mbps, say 500 just for futureproofing, or will 200 be adequate?

Also, I can plug one of these into the socket next to my PC and that means I will have one free adapter, right? Could I use this one to connect my Sky box to the Internet too, or does this second one need to be in the same room as the router and modem (I am assuming that the router will be wireless, therefore negating the need for the second power line adapter - I read somewhere that one needed to be in the same room as the router, but couldn't figure out why, so thought I'd ask)

One more thing, for connecting my iPad, I assume it still connects through the wireless router. Right?

Dave
 
200Mbs is probably adequate .... think powerline sustains about half its rated speed in one direction so 100Mbs is almost certainly adequate for connecting via router to broadband.

The powerline "starter pack" you point to has 2 adaptors as you need to use one to connect the router to the mains and another to connect the PC to the mains as powerline is using your ring mains wiring as a network. If you want to connect Sky box as well then you can buy an additional adaptor to add it to the network. N.b. I think adding large numbers of powerline adaptors can cause issues since my understanding is they convert the ring mains into something like an old style "shared" ethernet network (not the modern switch based star topologies) so have situations where more than one adapator wants to transmit at the same time and packets collide which requires the adaptors to back off and retransmit - clearly as number of adaptors increase the likelihood of this increases and overall bandwidth decreases.

Powerline adaptors just need to be connected to the same mains supply - i.e. in a normally wired house this will be all the sockets. Think recommendation is that they are always plugged directly into socket and not into adaptors (n.b. paying extra for the ones with a pass-through main socket may be worthwhile if you are short of sockets) - though have seen people saying this isn't an issue .... for me it was + I also found I had some issues if I used the same socket as my PC and related hardware but that might be down to dodgy wiring in my house!
 
Thanks for the info and help deshepherd. I obviously don't know as much about this subject as I thought I did. We will have to wait and see what Tuesday brings. Thanks to everyone for the help.
 
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