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wireless broadband and airport

S

sally an

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 13, 2005
2
0
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Forgive my ignorance in this matter.
I have a G4 ibook that's airport ready and I want a wireless broadband connection at home. As I'm with Telewest for phone and tv, it's logical (and cheap) for me to go with them for broadband.
They say that I cannot do it wirelessly with a mac.
Is this true ?
I've read discussions about routers and airport but can't find anything about whether isps have to be airport friendly or is that down to the router ? Is that because it's irrelevant ?
If Telewest supply me with a cable modem, can I attach a wireless router to it which will talk to my airport card ?
or not ?........

ib g4/10.3.7 and a pb/G3 pismo and a G4/dual 1.25
all fantastic
 
You really should have no problem. All you have to do really is to buy a wireless router (though, of course, you don't need one of those ones with built-in ADSL modem!), hook it up to your cable modem, set it up, and you're going.

Some ISPs provide the wireless set-up themselves, which might make it incompatible with certain systems --- although I'd imagine they'd use 802.11 standards, which mean that it should really work with any compatible system.

Don't listen to Telewest -- just get your cable modem installed, buy a router, hook it up, go through the brief set-up and enjoy wireless all over your house (I particularly enjoy using my Powerbook in the bathroom ;) )

G'luck!
 
Should work fine, be sure to get an ETHERNET modem and not a USB one (I don't know if this applies to cable like it does for ADSL).
 
Yeah make sure it's an ethernet modem and you should be fine. I think companies like Telewest just say that so they don't have to offer tech support for the oh so mysterious Mac...
 
I've got an Airport base station connected to the modem that Telewest provided and It's working fine, sharing the connection with 3 macs.

The only problem was the "engineer" they sent round to install it didn't know how to set-up the network/connections preferences on a mac, he would only set up a direct connection to one mac and I had to set-up the base station once he had gone.

This was about 12 months ago now so things may have changed.
 
I've recently had Telewest broadband put in and the way it worked for me is that the engineer came in and did the installation through my external wall and connected it to their provided cable modem. Then I connected it directly to my laptop using ethernet (their modem does both USB and Ethernet) to ensure the connection was working, the engineer has a 'leaflet' about the set-up for mac's but no idea what to do it.

Once I checked it and he'd gone, I plugged the ethernet cable into my wireless router and off i went..... three macs connected to it and off we go. Been very pleased with the whole set-up and I started on the 256 which is being bumped to 512 for free in May :)

Enjoy!

G4 12" iBook 768MHz RAM
G3 700MHz iMac
20GB 3G iPod
512MB iPod Shuffle
 
Don't worry about it. The Telewest (blueyonder) modem is an ethernet modem by default. It's incredibly easy to set up; I did it for Mum over Christmas.

The engineer will install the cable box and modem. He'll leave you with an ethernet cable and a CDROM which you can ignore. Plug the ethernet cable into your Mac and you'll be connected (once the modem's flashed a few lights and connected at the other end). To make it wireless, turn off the cable modem and plug the ethernet cable into a wireless router (Mum has an Airport Express since she also wanted wireless printing). Go through its set-up and you'll be sorted. So long as the router has a browser based interface it's irrelevant whether you're on a Mac or a PC; it's just more likely that if you call Tech Support they'll be able to help more if you're on a PC
 
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