BT Broadband and Airport Extreme Network Question

dubhe · Nov 4, 2012

I am buying a house that needs renovation, and part of that project will be to hardwire my home network from room to room.

My internet will come into the house by BT telephone line, and into the BT broadband box. I will wire this to my Airport Extreme, which will be my main router.

I want to wire my apple tv into my airport, but the apple tv will actually be right next to the bt broadband. Am I able to plug the apple tv into the bt broadband, or do I have to run a separate wire up to my airport which will be in another room? I'm guessing the later, but has anyone any experience of this?

peskaa · Nov 4, 2012

I'm a BT Infinity customer, which uses the Home Hub 3, so this should be the same for ADSL as well.

Keep the HH3 as the DNS/DHCP server for your network, which means the HH3 is doing all the 'heavy lifting' for the network (assigning IP addresses, routing traffic) and hence this will allow you to hook your AppleTV directly in to the HH3 with an ethernet cable. You can't really have the APE as your main router, as that router has to be at the 'point of entry' (ie: connected to your modem), which is the spot occupied by the HH3.

The AirPort Extreme will then be connected via another ethernet cable to the HH3, and will simply be creating a wireless network and not performing any routing tasks.

Of course, you can do what I did and turn the wireless on the HH3 off completely, so only the AirPort network is running.

colshine · Nov 4, 2012

dubhe said:
I am buying a house that needs renovation, and part of that project will be to hardwire my home network from room to room.

My internet will come into the house by BT telephone line, and into the BT broadband box. I will wire this to my Airport Extreme, which will be my main router.

I want to wire my apple tv into my airport, but the apple tv will actually be right next to the bt broadband. Am I able to plug the apple tv into the bt broadband, or do I have to run a separate wire up to my airport which will be in another room? I'm guessing the later, but has anyone any experience of this?

Why is the AE in another room? If the BT box is a modem and router all in one then you can connect it to directly to the ATV. I need a little more detail to confirm on your current setup to confirm.

colshine · Nov 4, 2012

peskaa said:
Keep the HH3 as the DNS/DHCP server for your network, which means the HH3 is doing all the 'heavy lifting' for the network (assigning IP addresses, routing traffic) and hence this will allow you to hook your AppleTV directly in to the HH3 with an ethernet cable. You can't really have the APE as your main router, as that router has to be at the 'point of entry' (ie: connected to your modem), which is the spot occupied by the HH3.

The AirPort Extreme will then be connected via another ethernet cable to the HH3, and will simply be creating a wireless network and not performing any routing tasks.

Of course, you can do what I did and turn the wireless on the HH3 off completely, so only the AirPort network is running.

You don't need the HH in your setup. The AE is able to perform all the tasks of the HH and it does it better. I have infinity as well and never even opened the HH my AE does everything.

davidoloan · Nov 5, 2012

colshine said:
You don't need the HH in your setup. The AE is able to perform all the tasks of the HH and it does it better. I have infinity as well and never even opened the HH my AE does everything.

I also set it up this way.

You connect the Airport Extreme in place of the BT home hub and follow the steps in Airport Utility to set up your network.

The only BT information you will require is:

Encapsulation : PPPoE
Broadband Username : bthomehub@btbroadband.com
Broadband Password : none required

The latest BT Homehub is not too bad with comparable range, but with the extreme as your main router you will have a better basis for creating a roaming (extended) network. The airport utility apps for Mac, Windows and IOS make it much easier to adjust, maintain or just see what is happening on your network.

----------

dubhe said:
I want to wire my apple tv into my airport, but the apple tv will actually be right next to the bt broadband. Am I able to plug the apple tv into the bt broadband, or do I have to run a separate wire up to my airport which will be in another room? I'm guessing the later, but has anyone any experience of this?

You can run an ethernet cable from your apple TV directly to your Extreme or the Home Hub if you use it, or to a switch.

The extreme only has 3 ethernet ports but you can increase this by 4, 8, 12, 16 or more ethernet ports by adding a gigabit switch.

colshine · Nov 5, 2012

davidoloan said:
The latest BT Homehub is not too bad with comparable range, but with the extreme as your main router you will have a better basis for creating a roaming (extended) network. The airport utility apps for Mac, Windows and IOS make it much easier to adjust, maintain or just see what is happening on your network.

I found the HH3 wireless to be terrible but to be fair I only used it for a day or two before packing it up and deciding to stick with the Extreme that I already had.

peskaa · Nov 5, 2012

colshine said:
You don't need the HH in your setup. The AE is able to perform all the tasks of the HH and it does it better. I have infinity as well and never even opened the HH my AE does everything.

davidoloan said:
I also set it up this way.

You connect the Airport Extreme in place of the BT home hub and follow the steps in Airport Utility to set up your network.

The only BT information you will require is:

Encapsulation : PPPoE
Broadband Username : bthomehub@btbroadband.com
Broadband Password : none required

The latest BT Homehub is not too bad with comparable range, but with the extreme as your main router you will have a better basis for creating a roaming (extended) network. The airport utility apps for Mac, Windows and IOS make it much easier to adjust, maintain or just see what is happening on your network.

----------

You can run an ethernet cable from your apple TV directly to your Extreme or the Home Hub if you use it, or to a switch.

The extreme only has 3 ethernet ports but you can increase this by 4, 8, 12, 16 or more ethernet ports by adding a gigabit switch.

Interesting, I might give this a go. My only concern would be for trouble shooting with BT if that ever was needed, they will surely complain if I'm not using the HH.

angelsguardian · Nov 5, 2012

Get a Draytek 120 modem from ebay to replace the HH (it'll be more stable and extract more speed) and the AE will control that with the details above. No need to ever touch modem. One big advantage of using AE for all network tasks for you with ATV is that it means the ATV will wake a sleeping iTunes server for content. If you use anything else it won't. Also you may be surprised how well ATV will work wirelessly with AE, give it a try.

colshine · Nov 5, 2012

peskaa said:
Interesting, I might give this a go. My only concern would be for trouble shooting with BT if that ever was needed, they will surely complain if I'm not using the HH.

I put mine back in its box. If BT ever complain it'll take it out otherwise it'll never see the light of day!

dubhe · Nov 5, 2012

colshine said:
Why is the AE in another room? If the BT box is a modem and router all in one then you can connect it to directly to the ATV. I need a little more detail to confirm on your current setup to confirm.

The BT Box is located by the phone line in the front room, but I want the Airport to be in the middle of the house, which is low down upstairs.

I could add a telephone extension, but I am not sure how that helps my bandwidth if I keep extending the phone line.

My TV is also in the front room, hence the ATV problem.

I do not use the wireless on the BT Box at present, though as I have eluded to I am renovating a new house that I do not yet live in, so the set up is a new design, and one I have time to plan and build properly.

On that theme, I am trying to think of all the cabling I need to put in before I patch up and paint the walls. Power, Ethernet, TV, Telephone - what else do I need to future proof my home?!

colshine · Nov 6, 2012

dubhe said:
On that theme, I am trying to think of all the cabling I need to put in before I patch up and paint the walls. Power, Ethernet, TV, Telephone - what else do I need to future proof my home?!

For future proofing - work out the number of cables runs you need and then double it. For example instead of running one cable from your modem to Airport run 2. Once you've finished renovating you won't be able to add more or replace broken cables so best to have spares.

When I was redecorating my new place I created a rough floor plan and worked out where I would like to place my electronic devices and either ran cables or made sure my wireless signal ran extended to all possible locations of current and future internet enabled devices.

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