Why bother with WiFi on FreeviewHD kit?

I’ve been looking at some of the reviews of various FreeviewHD equipment online, and I’ve seen comments – from both readers and reviewers – about it being a shame there’s no WiFi built in.

Personally, I think it’s good thing; that might seem strange – who wouldn’t want to hook up their new recorder to the internet without cables trailing around the room?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. WiFi seldom is.

I wrote a piece for the PCW blog over a year ago called, ‘My Dutch WiFi Hell.’ In that I talked mostly about the problems of getting a decent connection in a couple of Amsterdam hotels, so that I could use VoIP to avoid roaming charges. In one of the hotels, right in the city centre (which is more residential than a typical UK city centre), there were 22 networks visible from my room. It was impossible to connect a lot of the time, and when I could there wasn’t enough bandwidth to make calls.

Now, when you consider that streaming media, whether from a server in your home or over the internet, needs much more bandwidth than a simple voice call, and you’ll see there can be problems, when there are lots of networks in the same area.

What’s in a number?

Of course, most people in the UK won’t have anything like 22 wireless networks in their vicinity; if you live in the countryside, or a nice detached house, you might not have too many problems. But in city areas, where people live in flats, or houses that are much closer together, there can still be several networks visible to your computer – at weekends (presumably some of my neighbours turn their routers off when they’re not using them) I can often see seven networks from my living room.

You might think this doesn’t matter too much – after all, aren’t there 13 channels you can set your WiFi router to? – but clashes are more common than you might think, as each channel overlaps with two above and two below, so channel one overlaps with two and three. Channel six overlaps with four and five below, as well as seven and eight above. And with many people not even knowing how to change the settings on a router that came as part of their broadband deal, it can be hard to find a channel that’s not got too many other networks overlapping at least some of the space needed.

When channels overlap, you get congestion. Congestion slows things down, and means that sometimes I find that it’s not even possible to play standard definition video over the wireless network in my home – and that’s after I’ve selected the channels to minimise congestion. Short of knocking on doors and offering to reconfigure neighbours’ wireless networks for them, there’s not much more I can do.

It’s not just congestion

There are other reasons why WiFi is a bad idea on domestic equipment too. Compatibility is a big one. Sure, it can be more or less ‘plug and play’ sometimes, but not always, and people still find it tricky to make certain equipment talk to certain other equipment. Even something as basic as signing on to a network isn’t always simple; one of my home networks is an Apple Airport Extreme, and other Apple equipment has no problem. But for just about anything else, I have to enter a long string of letters and numbers to make it connect, rather than the password used by everything else. It’s fiddly and unfriendly.

You might say “well, people just need newer kit” and perhaps that would help. But if someone’s just spent £300 on a FreeviewHD recorder, do you really expect them to decide that they’ll replace their wireless network as well, just to make it work with that?

And if someone’s putting WiFi in a unit, what standard do they include? All of them? Or just the latest one? And which frequency? Unless you include all the wireless options, then some people will still need to replace kit. Even those who don’t, and who have a decent wireless network, may still end up with problems streaming, especially high definition video.

When they get those problems, they’ll call the Freeview HD manufacturer’s help line, who won’t be able to offer much in the way of network troubleshooting advice, because that’s not their job, and they can’t be expected to know the intricacies of every wireless router out there. So, the end result will be frustration all round.

WiFi might have seemed like a good idea a few years ago, and might still seem like a neat trick to people who live or test equipment somewhere where there’s no congestion, but for a huge number of people it’s utterly impractical for media streaming. Given that, and the potential for configuration headaches, and associated support problems, I think it’s entirely sensible that people aren’t building it in to FreeviewHD equipment.

No manufacturer wants to see people posting on the internet “This XXX recorder is rubbish, it won’t play streaming media properly and the helpline refuses to do anything” when the real problem is a shonky WiFi network the manufacturer can’t do anything about. But this is the internet, and that’s just the sort of thing people will say.

What to use instead? Personally, I use HomePlug AV, which sends data over the mains cables. I wrote a post about it earlier this year, which you may want to take a look at. And if you really do want to use WiFi, then the best solution is a wireless bridge that can plug into the Ethernet connecton on your Freeview HD box – leaving you to choose the adaptor that works best with your wireless network.

Connect your HD box to your home network

Originally published in Personal Computer World; expanded and updated for Gone Digital.

With both FreeviewHD and Freesat equipment featuring an Ethernet port, together with many games consoles and BluRay players, a key question for many people is how to connect up to the rest of your home network.

Freesat already provides iPlayer on some equipment, and it’ll be rolled out to more later (see here for details of updates to Panasonic Freesat TVs). BluRay offers ‘BD-Live’ with things like movie trailers, or extra information about actors, while games consoles offer online play against other users. Some Freeview HD boxes, including the Humax, will be offering internet video services like SkyPlayer, too. And, of course, you might want to play video or music that’s on your home computer.

Make the connection

That’s all very well, but for many people, the broadband connection isn’t necessarily in the same room as the TV. One alternative is to run a very long cable from one room to another, but that’s often untidy; WiFi is another, but in many built up areas, it’s problematic – I can see several networks from my living room, and the congestion is so bad that even playing standard definition films over my home network is jerky.

With its built in socket, this pass-through adaptor is a great way to link your router to a HomePlug AV network

For many people, then, HomePlug is a great solution; it uses your mains wiring to send signals across the home; you plug one adaptor in by the router, and link it with an Ethernet cable, and then plug another one in behind the TV, and connect if to your set top box, games console or BluRay player. The Home Plug AV standard claims speeds of up to 200MBps, though around half that is more likely in the real world. You could use slower 85MBps kit, but I recommend going for the ‘AV’ version – it’s often only around £10 more per adaptor, and having the extra capacity will be useful if you decide to use the HomePlug connection for other things too.

I’m using two products from Solwise here, which both support the HomePlug AV standard. The first is a single adaptor, with mains pass-through socket, which means you can plug in the adaptor, then plug something else into the socket on the front, as well as an Ethernet cable on the bottom – so you don’t lose the use of a powerpoint. The second is catchily called the ‘VESEnet HomePlug 3 port Ethernet power strip’ or Piggy-6.

The sockets on the Piggy-6 provide space for even the bulkiest mains adaptors

Living room solution

It’s pretty much tailor-made for the modern living room where you might have a few gadgets that can benefit from a connection to the home network. It’s a six way power adaptor, with surge suppression and filtering on the mains sockets, which are arranged around the hexagonal unit. It might look odd, but it’s actually very usable, and even bulky plug-top tranformers fit in easily – something that’s not always the case with straight power strips.

In the centre is a power button which turns all the sockets off – so it’s easy to save energy – and at the base are three Ethernet ports, plus a small set of lights and buttons to control the HomePlug side of things.

The buttons need to be pressed with a paperclip through a hole, annoyingly. That said, I didn’t need to press anything to add the unit to an existing HomePlug network. If you’ve not set up a HomePlug network before, all you have to do is plug in one unit, press it’s button, then plug in a second, and press the button on that too – it couldn’t be much simpler.

So, with the pass-through adaptor connected to a socket in my home office, and linked to the Ethernet switch, the Piggy-6 provides net access to a Panasonic Freesat TV, Humax Freeview HD box, and my laptop in the living room.

Performance

The filtering on the mains sockets of the Piggy-6 serves two purposes – it provides cleaner power to your devices, and it also stops those with cheap nasty power supplies from interfering with the HomePlug AV network. In my tests, the Solwise gear certainly seemed to perform well at that; with the Piggy-6 plugged into a problematic mains spur that supplies all the AV gear, I was able to stream standard definition video without a hitch, whereas a standalone unit that had no filtering kept losing the connection – though on our noisy spur, we only managed a connection at 40MBps, and HD video playback was still juddery. Connecting directly to the ring main boosted that speed more than threefold – so adaptor placement is obviously very important with HomePlug AV, and the filtering in the Piggy6 won’t solve every problem, though it certainly gave us improved performance.

Together, you’ll be looking at just over £100 for the two devices, which might seem a lot – but you’ll also have three Ethernet ports in the living room, to connect your gadgets to, and a six way filtered mains adaptor – for which you could easily pay over £30 on the high street anyway.

With three ethernet ports, this is a great way to connect your AV gear to the internet

So, if like me you’ve got several devices in the living room, like Freesat, FreeviewHD and BluRay players that want network connections, HomePlug AV, and the Piggy-6 in particular, could be a great solution – faster than wireless, and less messy than long cables.

Details

Price: (April 2010): Pass-through socket: £37.24, Piggy-6: £65.38

Contact: Solwise, 0845 458 4558