broadband, tv, phonelines...

[Zeus]

wondering if you guys can give me any advice on this...

so i've just moved into a new house with the GF, and realised i know very little about different tv and landline options.
where the tv needs to go (for the room layout to be sensible), there is currently a telewest connection - so that'll be cable i think? (the wire out of the wall physically looks identically to the one i'm used to having for my SkyBox at the parents)
elsewhere there is a normal aerial socket, that appears to be connected to a satellite dish, does this sound right? is that how freeview is recieved these days? i'm not quite sure about how the satellite dish is connected tbh, as theres lots of wires and i havnt had time to work out where they all go yet...
there is also a normal phone socket.
Neither of us is too bothered about having lots of TV channels - we'll watch them if they're there, but happy enough watching freeview/iplayer/dvd type stuff.
The TV i'm planning to get (more on this in another thread later probably!) is an LG Smart TV, so can do the iplayer stuff on it.

so.
my original plan, for simplicity, was to go entirely with BT. go for their 76MB infinity 2 package, which appears to come with BT TV. the hub would go in the corner of the living room where the socket is, and we'd all happily wireless to it (except i'd try to run a ethernet cable to my computer room, and probably not be able to ). but i'm now a bit worried about how the BT TV connection works - are they going to need to drill lots of holes and run new wires through the house? is BT TV done through satellite/cable, or is it done through the broadband, or just through normal TV transmission?

another option, to utilise the existing cable connection, is to go with Virgin for all of it. but if i go with them i have no idea how they work - do they use the cable connection (rather than the phone line) for everything? if so, is cable internet good enough for games these days (i vaguely recall high latency issues a few years ago?)? i'm not really keen on this option, tbh, though i'm not quite sure why!

or i could go with someone like Sky, but this brings back problems with needing to get new connections put in in the house i think. and i feel like with sky its too much of a focus on the TV side of things, considering we're not really bothered about tv.

so thats the background.

1) any recomendations? ideas i havnt thought of? thoughts on what i can do with the telewest cable point? can they easily connect a satellite to it on the outside of the house for example, rather than running new wires through the walls? hell, are they capable of running wires through the walls without leaving too much of a mess?


2) As a followup question, following discussions at work this morning, assuming the aerial socket is indeed a freeview enabled one, is there any good way to get that signal across the room without running a cable around the walls? as it would have to go across a doorway whichever way it went and thats not ideal... any sort of point-to-point tv retransmitters maybe?


the costs are all either much of a muchness, or the products are hard to compare (in terms of all of them including slightly different things!) so not too worried on that for now, just looking at concepts.

edit: i'm tempted to simplify this whole thing. how far can i run coax cable from the main socket without losing too much signal quality? the GF didnt seem too horrified by me running a cable around the room, so really tempted to just do that and forget all about the telewest cable connection

 

[Zed]

Let me help on some of it.

BT will use your existing incoming telephone socket - but the master one. They will change part of it to add their fibre connector and run a cable - within reason, from that location to where you want the two boxes to go (you need 2 power sockets for the router and the wireless box).

BT TV is likely to come through a seperate box or the router over broadband. Vision i think is what its called these days.. havent tried that.

Re ethernet. Silly boy!!! you need a couple of ethernet over power boxes - probably the HD 500MB ones - plug one into the wall near your wireless router (make sure it has a pass through plug on it) - the other(s) go where ever you want cabled access. Plug a cable in that to your pc, internet enabled dildo or laptop and you have wired access to the internet. I use this for the gaming machine and get the full 76mbs to the desktop

Re your other questions: photo's might help of the various connectors you have

 

[Aciiid]

I'd do a more simple test.

Pick up your phone and call someone, is the line crackly? Mine is so any ISDN type connection (sky, telewest, bt, ...) all use your phone line to transfer data (BT will use this to transmit tv as well as data so it'll be even worse). If this connection sucks it's gameover for those services and you'll have to go with Virgin who install a fiber straight to your house.

Virgin use adapters so effectively you have an IP phone so all your house systems run over the data link, they're not separated like the others (they do charge them as separate services though.

Sky uses satelite dish and decoder for tv, data services go over your phone line so you'll still need a bt (or whoever) phone line.

Edit: getting your tv signal to fly across the room would be interesting. We have a television gateway at work that streams tv onto our network and you could then pump that over wireless.... A bit extreme for home users I'd guess (you can't change channels). Maybe ignore it and just get apple tv which is sort of an "data streaming iplayer kinda thing" in a box. Other than that I don't know of any of my friends doing this, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a magic box out there that does this for all I know.