How best to connect to Internet via landlord's ISP?

[tfboy]

A friend of mine has recently moved into a new house.

His landlord is in the process of getting Virgin broadband which my mate will be allowed to use. However, he'd have multiple devices to connect (a couple of PCs and a PS3 and maybe some more). So rather than have them all connect to the virgin router wirelessly, he's thinking of having his own separate router which will be connected wirelessly to the virgin router, as a bridge, then have his PCs connected to his "local" router.

So I can think of two ways of doing this:

1) have a wireless router which can be configured in bridge mode along with the landlord's virgin router. Then connect the PCs to that with cables

2) have a wireless access point which connects to the landlord's virgin router. Then have a separate switch which will provide connections to the various devices.

Questions:

If a wireless access point or router is configured in a bridge mode, presumably, clients cannot connect to it directly, i.e. the WAP is either in bridge or in infrastructure mode? If so, then if he wants to go wireless bridge, the landlord's router would also need a separate WAP leaving the built-in wireless available to serve client connections?

I suppose the kit my mate will have to get will depend on which broadband router his landlord will get. Looking at Virgin's webpages, they show what looks like a Netgear router, but they also have a shop with lots of models, so not sure. Anyone have the "Virgin wireless bundle kit" and able to advise what you have?

Or is having two separate networks more complicated than it's worth? I think it would be better if he did have a separate network as it would sort of isolate it (my mate's local LAN could be on a different subnet which would be routed by his router / WAP onto the landlord's LAN which would then connect to the Internet).

Anything else I should be looking at?

TIA

[smargh]

Any old ADSL wireless router can be connected to with a "wireless bridge" - just get a £25 Buffalo router from Ebuyer and put DD-WRT on it, configured in "client bridge" mode. Then, the ethernet ports on the Buffalo will be treated in exactly the same way (from the perspective of TCP/IP setup) as the ports on the ADSL wifi router itself.

Unless I misunderstood what you were wanting???

[peterb]

He needs a switch - one port goes to the VM router, the others go the various devices. You can use a wireless router as a bridge, but in my experience results are very variable.