I'm trying to configure my home entertainment network to attach to my data network in my office. I live above my office and have my broadband connection on a wireless router. I'm now configuring a network in my loft for home entertainment.

Ideally, I would like to leverage my broadband connection in my office via my home entertainment network without making it seem like one single network.

I know a single network would be easy via WDS but then others in my office would have access to my home network which I'm trying to avoid.

I suspect that I won't get away with a single wireless router in my home to accomplish this - I have a Netgear 624v3 - and may need two wireless routers: One to act as a bridge/WDS and the other to create the private home network.

Thoughts?

Well if the wireless signal from you office reaches you could set up a router to bridge the signal but treat it as separate network. Probably need a router hackable with DD-WRT to do it since a wireless bridge would just connect the two networks. If you have a fast internet connection you could also use hamachi vpn to computers your install it to. This makes a virtual private network only as fast as your internet connection. The VPN with hamachi is easy but is going to be difficult to stream video. I would suggest orb for streaming audio or video from your media computers over internet if that is all you want to accomplish. Your comp needs to be at least a pentium 4 2.4 ghz to run it.

I have a set-up that might be of interest:

At my neighbour's house we have an ADSL modem/router to which is connected a Netgear WG602 Wireless Access Point. This forms a network 192.168.0.x that allows any connected wireless device to access the Internet. There is currently only a single PC on the network, with file & printer sharing disabled.

In my house I have a wireless network, with WPA encryption, to share files and printers (using IPX/SPX instead of TCP/IP, for security) 192.168.1.x based on a Netgear WGR614 wireless router. The WAN port of this computer is connected to a Netgear WGE101 wireless bridge set to 192.168.0.201 - this allows all PCs in my house to use the Internet but they can't be seen by from my neighbour's network.

I now want to upgrade the wireless bridge equipment to provide WPA security (the WGE101 won't do this) before my neighbour adds a laptop to his network and opens up file & printer sharing. I'll then have to check whether his computers are visible from my network - hopefully not!