Broadband / Networking Question

Hi,

I'm sharing a rented house at the moment and the landlord has said he is prepared to share his Internet connection. He has a small network of 3 or 4 computers, plugged into what looks like a wired router with a built in broadband modem. He has bought a Belkin wireless router so that we can access the Internet wirelessly. The instructions say that it needs two connections: one to a PC to configure it from, and the other to a modem. It does not mention what to do if a network already exists. I'm a bit confused about how to connect it all together, and if it can even be made to work? It's only the Internet that needs to be shared, as the landlord wants to keep his network private. The instructions suggests that this can be done easily enough.

I have very little knowledge about this kind of thing as I have never set up a network before. I'm guessing that perhaps what we need is a wireless access point rather than a router. Any advice would be appreciated. I don't particularly want to call Belkin unless I have no choice.

If he already has a router then it may be a simple case of just plugging the wifi router into the existing router.

On the other hand you may need to plug the wifi router into a PC first, access the admin panel which is usually by entering an IP address into your internet browser (the manual will have the address) and then turning off DHCP before plugging it into the router.

After that all you need is a wifi card in your pc and that should be it.

Naturally it's better to encrypt the network over wifi to stop the neighbours stealing your bandwidth but if you're new to setting up this kind of thing then get it working first before fiddling with the encryption side.