Hey everyone,

How do the receivers and wiring work with BES? I own a house it's only 2 years old in the beaches in Toronto. I called Bell to sign up, they said it's available but that it's only for condo's now that they are at capacity and aren't offering it to houses until the full service launches.

I'm finishing my basement and right now I have HD satellite. My current wiring is in my laundry room in the basement I have my phone line coming in from the outside with a jack there, then running to all the rooms in my house with my DSL being upstairs. From my satellite I have the 4 coax cables running in here as well and in here they connect to the big splitter than then runs to 4 rooms of my house.

Just can't seem to find out how the BES receivers connect? Do they use Coax or ethernet? Either is fine but if it's ethernet I need to change some wiring around before doing drywall since right now I don't have ethernet running to the laundry room just everywhere else. I just don't want to do all the drywall next week and then have issues when I switch to BES. Thanks!

Use Ethernet cabling, run it all into your laundry room to a switch (preferably Gigabit). You can then use this for both Internet and IPTV since it's all network based. You can also use COAX, but there tends to be many more issues with using COAX. Ethernet's the way to go if you have a chance. Use CAT5E at the minimum. CAT6 to futureproof things a bit in your home. Use good cabling if going through walls - you wont want to have to re-run cables.

You'll want to put the modem Bell provides you downstairs which will connect to the switch. So make sure there's a phone jack down there as well - preferably on a separate pair.

Perfect thank you! I already am good to go with the ethernet wiring to all the rooms just right now the switch is in a closet in the basement not near the laundry room. So I'll make sure I run the wiring so that it all terminates in there. Only thing is, is it not bad to have the wifi router in the basement? My house is 3 stories. Maybe I should run a second ethernet cable up into the living room then to put the wifi router up there..

It's always best practices to put the wireless device as high as you can go because wireless signals tend to spread in a cone shape downwards (easier than upwards I've found), but with that said, the modem you get from Bell for IPTV is a modem/wireless router combo unit. To be perfectly honest, the wireless on the device they give you is quite weak. I can only get around 11Mb throughput on it just for surfing the internet, but get much faster speeds plugged into it.

I'll be setting my Linksys WRT router soon (and keeping it connected this time). You just let the modem handle the PPPoE connections (one for the TV stream and one is for the Internet stream). The modem uses VLAN's to figure all of it out regarding the TV/Internet stream. You just need to ensure that a setting is turned on called 'Filter Multicast' (enable the setting). This comes at a reccommendation to some people on another forum. It has to do with how the Bell modem passes the signal to the set top boxes. It uses multicast to do so, but if you have a device that gobbles up the packets as the wireless routers tend to, it can mess with the STB's.

Disable the wireless on the Bell provided modem, put a Linksys device up on your top floor, and you should be in good shape.

One thought too - depending on how many ports you have - plug all the STB's into the Bell modem, and then use the last port and plug it into a wireless router and plug any additional ports into the wireless router. If wireless signal is too weak, replace the wireless router with a switch, and pop the wireless router up a little higher. If you can provide more details as to port count, layout, etc, then I could almost whip up a Visio diagram for you ;-)

BTW - I say Linksys because I usually put a hacked firmware on them which allows for lots of settings to be changed on them - one of them being signal strenth. If you're not up for all that, then I guess any wireless router would do.

Hope the info helps!

Thanks that helps a lot! The only last question I have is I'm just confused with wiring. Lets say right now I have 1 ethernet running from my bedroom to the laundry room where the Bell modem would go. If I wanted to put the wifi up there plus a receiver, do I need to run a second ethernet cable one for the receiver one for the wifi router (my airport extreme).? Or can I just use the one cable, put a switch in the bedroom then connect the receiver to one port on the switch and then the airport extreme to another port on the switch? Thanks!

The second easiest thing to do than running a conduit upstairs is more cables than you think you would need, including coaxes. The easiest is running a large conduit you can run all the wires you need when you need them, including wires for unforseen technology or a change in service.

To take care of almost any current service possibility, by wiring, running two coax and two cat5e(or cat6) is the norm.

The beuty of Ethernet is that you can easily pop in a switch anywhere, and there are some nice small switches available. So you only need to run one to your bedroom. Plug your STB into switch, plug Air Port Extreme into switch and config it so it's on a different network.

- Wireless Modem from Bell shells out: 192.168.2.x addresses by default (I think)
- On Air Port Extreme: Plug into WAN, and let it get an IP automaitcally. Then you set it to shell out IP's of 192.168.3.x addresses. Try the Filter multicast option if it's available. Don't know since I haven't had any experience with one of those devices.

If you can put 2 Ethernet cables to your bedroom, then do it, but you'll still still need to do what I said above about the config.