Just want an internet connection

[ceeb]

Hi All

I have rented holiday places where there is just a router that you log onto with no need for it to be connected to a PC. I would like to do this, just having a router in the front room with no PC so a laptop can just log on.

Anyone know how to do this please?

Thanks

ceeb

[Saab Dastard]

You need either a wireless-access-point-cum-broadband-switch-router (ADSL or cable) or the addition of a wifi switch / access point to work with an existing broadband switch / router. Obviously you'll need a broadband service connection to your home.

Alternatively, dispensing with a fixed broadband service, a 3g / 4g capable device to connect to your laptop (USB or similar), or a laptop with built-in 3g / 4g card. With either of these you'll need to subscribe to a mobile service provider.

SD

[Gizmo1]

I've recently purchased a device for under £20 that works great. Google "TP Link Nano Router". It also works in hotels that only have a wired connection or charge for each device that is connected wirelessly. Allows multiple devices wireless access from one wired input. .... Giz.

[henry_crun]

I'm just an ornery simple guy - this is what I did:

I contacted BT and asked for a broadband phone line. They set everything up and sent me a router (BT Home Hub 3). You don't have to be in when they deliver, cos it has no value to anyone else, they just leave it in a handy place.

The router plugs into your phone socket and also needs a mains supply. There is an adapter so you can still plug your voice phone in. Best to keep it close to the main phone socket, but if you have to extend they can provide extra adapters with "filters" to separate voice and broadband.

The router has a pull-out card with the "Wireless Key" written on it. To connect your laptop you need to look on your laptop for your wifi hub and enter the Wireless Key when prompted. This is remembered, so it is a one-off operation.

You can connect several items, I think mine is five, so you get wifi on your phone as well, and can connect to your printer, kindle etc though wifi. You can also connect your phone or laptop to any other BT router at a cafe, friend's house or whatever free of charge by entering your account password. As can any other BT subscriber use your router (at no cost to you).

Leave the router powered up full-time because they send updates, usually overnight.

The cost of broadband is fifteen or twenty pounds a month on top of the line rental. There are various tariffs, I had a limited one at first but eventually transferred to unlimited, only a few pounds more, so I can watch vids and listen to the radio without worrying if I go over the monthly data limit.

Hope this is helpful. Enjoy! :ok:

[ceeb]

Thanks for your replies, much appreciated. I already have a broadband connection and a router so I am going to give it a try and move it into another room on its own and see if I can log on with my laptop.

It will be nice not having to fire up an antiquated PC to connect to the www!

Cheers

ceeb.

[henry_crun]

The wifi is usually sufficient to serve several rooms unless you have a really big house or lots of metalwork. Your laptop should be detecting lots of wifi, two from your own router and those from next door and across the street.

[mixture]

a 3g / 4g capable device to connect to your laptop (USB or similar), or a laptop with built-in 3g / 4g card.

No, you don't.

Look up MiFi.


I contacted BT and asked for a broadband phone line.

Friends don't let friends touch BT broadband with a bargepole. :yuk:

Avoid doing direct business with any aspect of BT Retail (and indirectly via Wholesale/Openreach as far as feasibly possible by using LLU broadband etc. ).

[henry_crun]

MiFi - yes very good, converts 3G to wifi, much better than a 3G dongle. But the downside (as with the dongle) is limited data, high over-run charges and very limited performance. In my area I couldn't connect reliably daytime, had to do overnight to get any speed. The sim is interchangeable with any data-enabled phone on the same network, so no need to get a new sim. Can use anywhere in the uk that has a 3G signal.

BT - no probs here. You may get cheaper deals elsewhere but without the flexibility of being able to connect to any enabled BT Hub anywhere in the uk.

[Flying Serpent]

Friends don't let friends touch BT broadband with a bargepole.

Avoid doing direct business with any aspect of BT Retail (and indirectly via Wholesale/Openreach as far as feasibly possible by using LLU broadband etc. ).

Sigh...

It would be helpful if you substantiated your occasional rants against BT with some cold hard facts for the benefit of others.

[mixture]

Sigh...

It would be helpful if you substantiated your occasional rants against BT with some cold hard facts for the benefit of others.

They are not rants, I'd love to expand, but don't have the time to write up all the detail.

Both technically and commercially, they are very poor value products, and the post-sales support is horrendous.

Just this weekend I've been helping someone as a favour, they've got four BT residential lines .... their bill last quarter was £600..... £330 of which was being spent on line rental which BT inflated with artificial and useless bundle packages... sold under the pretext of saving people money with "anytime calls" and international bundles which saved them absolutely no money on calls they were billed for anyway.... only a small percentage of calls actually fell under the bundles. Having worked my magic, next quarter based on the same call pattern, their call charges will be £45 plus whatever the resulting basic PSTN line rental came to with all the crap removed.... as an example of "unnecessary crap" ... BT were charging them £1.50+VAT a month per line for "privacy service" which..... yes, primarily constitutes BT registering them on their behalf on the free TPS service !

Do you seriously think BT can sell £7/month broadband packages without cutting corners .....you get what you pay for in this life. It is simply not commercially viable to structure a decent product for £7 a month. BT rely on volume which comes with the associated FAPs, contention and many other things. Why do you think they need the BT Sport carrot to dangle in front of unsuspecting punters... or how about the cheeky way you pay BT on an opt-out basis to provide WiFi for others by them using your router as a Openzone/FON hotspot they carefully don't tell you about the big favour you're doing them on their TV adverts or in their marketing bumpf....

There is no comparison between a cheap BT broadband and more robust broadband..... but most people are just too stingy to cough up £35+ a month. Top of the range broadband, such as offered by Easynet LLU at around £64 a month for 20Mb is chalk and cheese from BT .... the structure of the Easynet service is excellent and I can call up a UK based support desk, get through to people who are on the ball and know their network inside out (no Level 1 script reading monkeys), the service gets proactively monitored, and there's a repair time SLA on it. Try getting that out of BT for £7 a month !

[henry_crun]

I've been on BT for over a year now, only use it for internet, though I can plug in a voice phone if I want. I have the basic package plus unlimited broadband using Hub3. Thirty-one pounds a month including line rental. It works perfectly and seamlessly. I use it for browsing, shopping and radio. Devices connected via wifi are tablet, phone and Kobo. Much better than other options. I'm one happy bunny. :ok:

[Ancient Observer]

When BT goes wrong, or tries to con the gullible, then it is a pain.

When all is well, it is fine and well priced.

At least it pays taxes in the UK and the pricing is for the vast majority of people very good indeed. And is you want Value, try its cheap brand, plusnet.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Sigh...

It would be helpful if you substantiated your occasional rants against BT with some cold hard facts for the benefit of others.

I've never met Mixture, but I know exactly what he's talking about. His experiences of BT are similar to mine, and would be to yours if you worked for some time in the industry.

However, i'd still put BT as a 'mediocre' solution, as their product however terrible can't be as bad as the customer service you can receive from TalkTalk.

[Ancient Observer]

The worst BT and Open Reach habit is their random assignment of Engineers to solve problems. When I did have an extended problem with them, some time ago, they must have wasted 10 years of profits from my (modest) account by sending out a stream of Engineers who had not been briefed on the problem and its history, and who stood less chance of solving the issue than my granny.
So if you and Mixture only get called in when there is a customer's issue, and are faced with unbriefed untrained folk, you have my sympathy.

[mixture]

So if you and Mixture only get called in when there is a customer's issue, and are faced with unbriefed untrained folk, you have my sympathy.

Oh the number of times I've seen that one ! Ranks amongst one of the top 10.

Not only repair engineers either.

The open screech engineers they dispatch to install LLU copper lines also require you to spend 20 minutes explaining to them what exactly they've been sent to do, and then spend 20 minutes comforting them when they go into a nervous breakdown because there's no dial tone on the line because nobody ever told them that might happen under certain configurations during their "training", so you have to tell them how to check they've correctly installed it.

I've also been at large sites where years of BT bodge jobs have left behind messy cabling in the DPs.... so I've been told by the current breed of "engineers" that they never close off jobs for those sites because they run in fear of the auditors coming round and seeing the poor state of the cabling.

His experiences of BT are similar to mine, and would be to yours if you worked for some time in the industry.

Indeed. Most people's interactions with BT are limited to perhaps a single BT phone line and broadband for their home .... maybe combined with a few "pub tales" from their mates.

Those of us who get to see more of BT can easily bore you to death with reams of war stories.

The same goes for solicitors who deal with BT. I recently had lunch with mine and we got chatting about BT.... even little battle-hardened me was astonished by some of his tales about the sales and contract negotiation process !

You have to remember the BT mindset...their priorities are....

1. Sell
2. Why haven't you signed up that customer yet ?
3. Next customer !
4. Post-sales "support" and "customer service" .... if you're lucky


However, i'd still put BT as a 'mediocre' solution, as their product however terrible can't be as bad as the customer service you can receive from TalkTalk.

The TalkTalk network is "OK", the lines are reasonably stable and it is largely LLU (and I'm a firm believer in avoiding BT resellers and going LLU for broadband) .... but yes..... they've lost their way a bit on customer service. I would still put BT at the top of the poor customer service league table, but TalkTalk are a very close second... hopefully TT will be the subject of an acquisition and so might see some positive changes to customer service.... but that may be an optimistic dream !

My choices are .....

If you have to be on a BT based network.... Zen Internet.
LLU .... Easynet (by extension, theoretically Sky should be OK because they run it over the Easynet LLU network.... but I haven't had much direct experience of the Sky setup, so I don't know how the commercials and technicals pan out).

There are other options out there too, particularly for businesses, but I'll keep it simple by just listing two.

P.S. Don't fall for the BT owned Plusnet......once BT have finished milking it as an "independent" brand they'll no doubt be merging it back under the BT Retail brand along with the associated changes to product structure.

[henry_crun]

Most people's interactions with BT are limited to perhaps a single BT phone line and broadband for their home

That is exactly what this thread is about, one person wanting connection in their own home.

If you want to rant about telecomms for businesses why not set up a thread about that, instead of invading a perfectly innocent domestic thread?

[P.Pilcher]

While PlusNet are independent, I am sticking with them like glue! British (Sheffield) based help desk and their service to me has never missed a beat. I am one of the single telephone line domestic user types. As I have been with them for ages, I get free hosting of up to six web addresses! I never knew what to do with this facility for years, but I do now and my pretty simple websites are hosted without problems.


I just hope that BT just watch PlusNet and learn.


P.P.

[henry_crun]

...and do you have PlusNet wires coming to you from a PlusNet telephone exchange?

[mixture]

That is exactly what this thread is about, one person wanting connection in their own home.

And that's my point !

People like that are unable to see the bigger picture.

Hence you need people like me to stop you from making the mistake which is entering into contracts with BT Retail that you'll later come to regret.

[M.Mouse]

Hence you need people like me to stop you from making the mistake which is entering into contracts with BT Retail that you'll later come to regret.

You are no doubt correct that BT in general is an appalling entity to deal with most of us do not have that experience much like Ryanair supply, to most people, exactly what it says on the tin despite those of us prepared to pay for quality in air travel not touching them with a bargepole!

I was with Nildram way back in ADSL infancy. Slightly dearer than others but reliable and great customer service. Roll forward several takeovers and I was a customer of Opal (part of TalkTalk) and after several months of tearing from my head what little hair I had left I gave up and moved to BT.

BT Infinity has been rock solid and reliable at reasonable cost. I would suggest that probably 95% of BT customers have no complaint because the service works. Should my service go wrong I appreciate I will be dealing with a chaotic and dysfunctional 'customer service' call centre and often poorly trained engineers.

You clearly know your subject and no doubt set very high standards, as I do in anything I am involved in. Sadly the world is not generally built that way. People want cheap, organisations like BT work on numbers. 95% of customers happy, 5% mighty pissed off = profits and success, screw the dissatisfied.

B & Q, Sky, Ryanair, BT all very successful organisations in terms of profit and market share but are they companies I like and am happy to deal with..........

Don't get me started on Vodafone.

[mixture]

BT all very successful organisations in terms of profit and market share

BT only make the profit they do because of their monopolistic marketshare.... if they don't get you via BT Retail, chances are in 100% of the cases for Residential customers and 70% of the cases for Business Customers they've got their fingers in the pies that will get them a piece of the action via BT Wholesale or BT Openreach. The regulator has no teeth.

I don't think you can pat BT on the back for being successful given all the benefits they enjoy. The only way they'd make a loss is if you put a bunch of toddlers in charge of the show.

Re:successful .... B&Q agreed, Ryanair agreed, Sky partially .... they don't exactly have much competition.

Part of the problem, as you say, is the stupid rush to the bottom on pricing caused by the idiotic lo to no cost mentality of customers, particularly the residential private individuals.

But quite frankly, companies like BT should know better and should not be structuring and marketing products the way they do to uneducated customers. Sure, make it cheap... but don't hide behind fancy marketing and small print... make it clear what compromises you've made in order to deliver the service at that price point.

Agree with you on Nildram, and have seen what happened to them. Hence my warnings about BT & Plusnet..... one day, it will happen... not might, will. :cool:

Over and out from Mixture who has happily never flown Ryanair and only Easyjet once because the nearest anyone else could get me was 200 kilometres away !

[Ancient Observer]

Mixture

Some of us are pensionners and cannot afford anything but the cheapest/best value deal available.

Markets have segments.

You are happy in the posh segment with Apple £500 tablets etc. I'm in the cheap segment with my £100 cheapo Android grief-giving tablet, and the cheapest deal I can hassle from BT.

[mixture]

AO ... not quite sure you grasped the point I was making....:sad:

[Ancient Observer]

What I meant was as a pensionner I am one of these...."Part of the problem, as you say, is the stupid rush to the bottom on pricing caused by the idiotic lo to no cost mentality of customers, particularly the residential private individuals."

[mixture]

AO,

Ah, well.....pensioners were not included in "idiotic lo to no cost mentality of customers" .... :E

Surely the whole "rush to the bottom" thing can't have escaped your observation ? So many marketing messages are about cheap cheap cheap.....look at the supermarket adverts for example.

[Ancient Observer]

It's not all a rush to the lowest price point. I used to work for an fmcg Co and I could bore you for hours about market segments and how to define them using psycho/socio/econ criteria.

When the wife buys Farrow and Ball, (which is technically no better than Dulux) the hubby buys Bose, (I'd buy Denon or NAD) and the kids wear Ugg boots (made in China).............they are just a part of a segment.

That's why Tesco love their clubcard - it tells them more about you than the psycho-phds that they used to employ.

How did you get status on Malaysian?

[mixture]

It's not all a rush to the lowest price point.

I dunno... in telecoms and IT, a lot of it is....

How did you get status on Malaysian?

Dunno, but someone must love me... my upgrade was from Business to First and pretty much each member of the cabin crew came to grovel at my feet before departure and profusely thank me for flying Malaysian. :E

Their satay service is one of the best things I've eaten on an airline for quite some time too !

[gas path]

So, basically everyone is saying, pick a broadband package and take your chances!
I've been looking to change mine to fibre and can't make up my mind whether to go for just a basic line or get a TV package as well.:hmm:
The little green box is about 100 mtrs away and I know that has fibre running to it.
JFI I've been with aol since 1997 and I must say its worked flawlessly. I don't have any aol software (desktop!) on the computers and the netgear router is one given to me years ago.
So I'm still no the wiser:{

[Ancient Observer]

gas path
for a practical reply.................If you go with BT, who are chasing prices down, as mixture points out, along with plusnet, their "cheaper" brand, then, if all goes well, then it will be fine.
Mixture and others point out that if you have problems, though, BT is an often impenetrable bureaucracy, with too much IT help outsourced to script readers in India, who do not help as they are neither trained nor empowered to help.
As I pointed out above, their inept bureaucracy might allocate the wrong engineer to "solve" any problems........this is frustrating when you have to stay home to let them in.
So you can go with BT, and fingers crossed, all will be well. If it is not well, be prepared for some truly average service. As othewrs have said before, if the service is bad, write to the CEO and/or the Chairman, to get their support units on the job.
I am 1 km from the Green box which has fibre. I get 46 mega whatnots, which is very impressive.......I think I get that because I have a newish copper cable for the last 100 yards.

[mixture]

Rare be it for me to show a degree of agreement with the Ancient one....:cool:

Broadly speaking he summarises correctly. By all means sign up with BT, but just be aware of the many pitfalls that come with the combination of a low price point and incumbent carrier. Caveat emptor as they say.

Mixture and others point out that if you have problems, though, BT is an often impenetrable bureaucracy, with too much IT help outsourced to script readers in India, who do not help as they are neither trained nor empowered to help.

Indeed... only just yesterday I rang up about a fault.... first question that came from the Indian one was "Are you able to make incoming and outgoing calls ?", to which I replied slowly and clearly "yes, I am able to make incoming and outgoing calls" (with emphasis as indicated). Our dear correspondent script reader then attempted to talk me through the script for .... yes, you guessed it .... troubleshooting lines where the customer is unable to make incoming or outgoing calls !

One was not amused. Bearing in mind that I had ALSO pressed the correct button on the IVR to tell their system I was NOT calling about a dead line. :mad:

[axefurabz]

I haven't had to phone BT for a very long time. However, having decided to change ISP on one of my lines to BT, I was recently looking for my router - sorry, home hub - to turn up. What arrived was a special delivery label attached to a folded, empty, plastic envelope slightly larger than the label. Imagine my fun and delight explaining that one to India!

To be fair, it was sorted within the promised 24 hours (impressive as it was pm and I live "offshore") but what arrived was a small box proclaiming to the world that it contained my replacement home hub. [This was of interest to the postie as it transpired he was having ongoing difficulty with his BT internet. But that's a different story...] Among the paperwork was a warning that I might be charged if I don't return the old router.

I confess that I have written them an actual hard-copy letter. Hopefully, this one will not run ... :cool:

[ricardian]

I live on a small island (Stronsay, Orkney UK) and a friend recently moved house on the island - from a small rented private house with BT phone/broadband to a council house whose previous occupant had BT phone/broadband.

She asked BT to transfer her phone & broadband from the old house to the new house on a particular date. The date arrived and my friend found that the phone/broadband at her old house had ceased to work (as expected). However, no dialtone when a phone was plugged into the master socket at the new house.

During a phone call to BT (India) she was informed that there was no line at the new house and an engineer would have to travel out to the island and install a new line. After several weeks of phone calls & emails (including submitting a video of the incoming BT phone line and a sworn statement from the previous occupants) BT said they would send out an engineer. The following week the BT engineer arrived and sorted out her phone/broadband.

But the story doesn't end there. So far my friend has had THREE visits from BT engineers to "install her new line" - these visits involve a 4 hours round trip on the ferry and represent a full day's work for the engineer even though there's nothing for him to do.

[dogle]

I trust that the OP is well content ... and I tip my hat to mixture. (I shall remain silent in the matter of that outfit which once briefly sported a logo which swiftly became known as the Prancing Pederast ... and worse things ... lest, if I vent but a whiff of my viciousness on that topic, I be banned from this place forever).

Copper pairs worked quite well for early, very slow digital stuff (railway telegraph), tolerably well for LF analogue (voice telephone), but thenceforward the higher the frequency, the greater the signal leakage via the cable self-capacitance ... which of course gets worse as the cable gets longer. It follows that you should never expect crackingly good 'broadband' at the end of a long, copper exchange line, no matter how determinedly and fluently the sales people lie to you.

Being at the end of a couple of Km of waterlogged multicore (interrupted not long ago by people who like to recycle such stuff via the scrap merchants) I long looked forward to the day when cellular internet connections might be worthwhile. The creaky GSM services in my rural patch were unsatisfactory, but eventually 3G arrived with an acceptable 2.1GHz signal. I have been pleasantly surprised, and so now pass on my experiences in case they may benefit others.

It would be daft to sign up for a contract before making sure the service was acceptable (or ever, for me, as now I know) and at first I was deterred by the charging structure offered by celluar ISPs who perversely cap both data use and period of use on prepaid deals. (Surely a noteworthy marketing gaffe because that way, whichever expires first, the punter feels he has missed out on the other one). I now wish I hadn't been, and had jumped in sooner.

Although my data traffic is quite modest, because most of my use is for reading, rather than downloading videos etc., I expected that I would scoff my quota long before my first, exploratory 30-day 'trial' expired. Not so! - the traffic metered was ~ ¼ of my estimate, based on my ADSL/WiFi traffic. I was astonished, and I suspect that the difference may be at least partly due to excessive 'dropped packets' (electronic equivalent of "Say again?? ....Say again??") on a poor landline connection (... hmm ... nice little earner, no?).

I was impressed; the only drawback was having to wind back security settings on my email service due to frequent IP address changes.

The upshot is that, now, I have:-
- no "service" "engineers"
- no exasperating conversations with Bangladesh
- no line rental (no line, grand!)
- no damned direct debits
- no router tantrums
- no contract (prepaid SIMcards), ergo, no phishing (full anonymity, no junkmail)
- no 'excess' charges (just bin SIMcard on expiry, have another ready)
- a reliable, hassle-free internet service at last, for less each week than half the price of a good pint.

- ...and, WRT the OP, one I can use in any UK holiday place within range of a suitable base station.