Any hints?
re: wireless range. It will be overstated but the range of 54g is over what you should need anyway.
What is more important is siting of the router, also the sitings of the individual PCs most notably where the antennae of the adaptors are.
Water, metal, microwaves, cordless phones, will also degrade your signal.
The Belkin PCI adaptors are fine apart from the aerials. They basically screw straight onto the card and that's where all the wiring for your PC is. I got a new antenna on a wire and moved it miles away from the pc and the coverage is miles better, almost no downtime now.
The usb ones are quite good as they come with extension stands so you can put the adapter miles away from the pc.
As for siting of the actual router obviously you're going to need to cable it away from your STB or SACM so it's governed by that. You could get ntl to set you up a SACM or move the existing one if you're getting signal issues. Basically the same restrictions apply: keep it central to your PCs, avoiding metal, water, microwaves, etc etc.
One final note... the security measures are there for a reason and that reason is to stop unauthorised access to the lan. Use them. Particularly useful are:
- MAC address filtering... only lets "allowed" addresses on the lan but these can be cloned. It's a decent start though.
- WEP encryption... encrypts your data so it can't be read by "snoopers"
- Don't broadcast the SSID [change it]
- Change the router's default password
anything i've missed?