Homechoice television service and wifi

[Guest Dr Who]

I am moving into a new flat next week and am planning to get the Homechoice television and broadband service. They offer a wifi connection package but want to charge me £125 for the router, the first adapter and installation and I want to run 2 laptops from it, and they want to charge an extra £50 for another adapter. I have no wifi experience but I am sure I could set it up and begrudge paying that much. Does anyone know if you have to get the wifi package from them or whether you can buy an off-the-shelf router and configure it yourself? Any suggestions for a router and adapter?

[Guest idavid]

i have had homechoice up and running for about 10 days. the tv is average but the broadband (especially at 1mb) is fantastic.

i had to buy i new router. the netgear one i had has a modem inside and cannot be connected to the homechoice modem (silver box thing). to replace it i used a Linksys WRT54G availablr here http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopD...9&ShopGroupID=8

it ran first time when set up. just plug it into the silver box, power up the silver box, then power up the router. it should do it all for you :)

i am currently running two laptops off it. you will need a wireless card for your laptop, such as this http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopD...rdbus%20Adapter

or this http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopD...rdbus%20Adapter

or any other really.

let me know how it goes.

ps you dont have to buy stuff from broadbandbuyer, but they have beemn very good for me in the past.

so all told. one router and two cards should set you back around £100. dont buy their one!

[Guest Dr Who]

Cheers idavid, that is exactly what I needed!!!

Why is the TV average? Is the picture quality poor? If so is it worse than NTL - I hope not!!! Or is it just the channel selection? Don't s'pose you have tried Sky through Homechoice have you?

Thanks a lot for the reply, I really didn't want to have to shell out that much. Just realised I don't need the adapters anyway 'cos they are both centrino laptops. Still, save me £50 on the router ;-)

[Guest idavid]

the tv quality is not as good as sky or cable. bear in mind that its all coming through the telephone line. apparently they are going to start mpeg-4 encoding for the tv channels soon, so it should improve but it is noticably worse at the moment. channels are a bit limited as well, but the VOD (video on demand) is fantastic. they have tons of stuff on there and you can watch it all whenever you want and pause rewind ffoward it all!

[Guest Dr Who]

I hated NTL - the compression was easily visible on many channels (especially the 'cheap' ones). Fire or water was pixellation city! Spoke to someone today who said the bandwidth on homechoice was either 3Meg total (i.e. 1 meg for TV) or 5 meg total (3 meg for TV), they were a bit vague. Friend of mine thought the ADSL limit was about 8meg? NTL always looked like they upped the bitrate for TV on demand, is homechoice the same?

General opinion of Homechoice? I am quite interested, just on the techno aspect!!!

[Guest idavid]

i read somewhere that it was a 6mb service. 2mb reserved for broadband and the other four for the tv.

personally i think its a fantastic service. 35 quid for 1mb broadband and tv. bargain!

[Guest Dr Who]

Posted from my SmartPhone!i agree! had ntl b4 but no broadband in my area :-(

is the router like dhcp server?

many thanks 4 the replies - new 2 this wifi business!

Posted from my SmartPhone!

[Guest Dr Who]

Hey idavide, cheers for the advice. Glad to hear that I don't need to input any codes or anything to get things configured. I think I will probably get the same router as you indicated, but I did see this and assuming I was running a 'b' only network can you see any reason why this adapter would not work?

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...oduct_uid=51436

Cheers

Who?

[Guest idavid]

i think it looks alright. dont take my word for it though.

[Guest Dr Who]

Sorted it all out last night and the cheaper 'b' only router worked fine. Like you say just plug it in and it worked straight away - no need to configure anything! Wish I had read the instructions when it came to enabling the encryption though - suffice to say that you need to hard connect to the router for this step! Agree with your comments - TV picture is pretty arse, although still better than over-the-air where I am. Video on demand is pretty amazing - not sure I have watched any regular TV since we got it on Monday. The on-demand music channels are fab, we now have a video juke box of our favourites. Goodbye MTV!

[Guest idavid]

yeah. the on demand stuff is great. apparently there are 2500 music videos :shock: :shock: :shock: glad to hear you got the router working staight off.

another peice of advice. if the service goes down, which it has twice for me (for about half an hour), phone them up and demand a refund! ^_^ i got five quid twice. every little helps.

[Guest Dr Who]

Anyone else perceive an improvement in the video quality on Homechoice of late? Don't know whether I am just getting used to it but I am sure it has improved, other than the lines running across the screen (anyone else see this?).

[Guest idavid]

havent got it anymore. the X kept it, the flat and our two babies... :cry:

[Guest Dr Who]

S**t. Sorry to hear that, man...........

[Guest idavid]

its not true about the babies... :lol: :cry:

[Guest Dr Who]

Oh well, that improves matters - I hope you managed to watch a lot of movies on demand before you left. And perhaps signed up for Sky????