It depends on how your house is wired.

Ours has a 2 way split outside, with one feed going about 6' down to the current location of the cable modem; the other going up about 50' into the attic. Once in the attic, there's a bunch of 2 way (-3 dB/-3 dB) and 3 way (-3/-4.5/-4.5) splitters to feed a TV signal to the 9 rooms that have a cable signal; so any TV has at least a 4.5 db drop and may have as much as 9 dB compared to what the cable modem is getting. A 3 dB drop means the signal is half as strong as it was before the splitter; a 9 dB drop means the output is just 1/8 the strength of the original signal.

Odds are, your house is wired such that the input goes into a single 3 way or 4 way (-4.5 each), and thus every outlet is roughly the same signal strength, or at most 3 dB (an extra 2 way down the line) down from the others.

Also, to further make the issue moot - the single cable outlet in my room is already in use by my cable box.

Does it make a difference? It can. My old apartment's signal was barely strong enough to hold a connection - you should have seen the clusterfuck of splitters and wires in that thing. Of course I never paid for most of the channels I had...

 

The way i have mine is...

a wired router is downstairs (that has a four port switch).
one port goes to x-box, another port goes to a wireless access point
upstairs I have another wireless access point (which creates a wireless bridge) which leads to a hub which my puters are on.

 

That's an interesting setup Tep... never have any connectivity issues with the bridge?

 

Nope, make sure you setup WEP on both sides of the bridge (so your neighbors can't use your connection). I had one of the first 2.4ghz phones that would occassionally knock me off (since the WAPs are 2.4ghz and the phone would randomize which channel it was on).

It's a good setup if you already own a router and have a townhome type situation like I do. Although, WAPs might run you about $70 a pop. You cannot use a wireless router and a WAP together (even though you SHOULD be able to from a engineer-guy's standpoint), I know linksys doesn't support this.

 

Interesting. Given the computer density in my room, that might make more sense...

 

Let me know if you need help with it at all. I went through some trial and error trying to get the WAP and a Wireless router to work before I contacted LinkSys who told me no way possible. Of course, if you use another brand, it might be possible. Buy at BestBuy since they let you return open hardware if you are just exchanging.

 

oh and I use a hub upstairs only because I already had one. If you need to buy a hub/switch for upstairs, opt for a switch (linksys 4port switch = $27). If you aren't hardware savvy, let me know.

My solution is definitely a pricier solution if you don't have anything, but if you've already got some stuff and don't want to run cables through your house/apt/cardboardbox/etc it pays.

 

Cables being run outside my room are a . Inside my room it's fair game. But most likely I'll just go with the wireless adapter for the xbox and keep it simple.

Everything in our setup is NetGear superG, for what it's worth.

 

Now stop talking about it and get on and play so I can smack you in the back of the head with a shotgun.