TV & Home Theater

[marz]

Greetings!  We just recently purchased a Panasonic Viera plasma TV with a Panasonic BD87 BlueRay player.  The Geek Squad set it up, and everything works fine except...  The Blue Ray player won't maintain a connection to the internet.  The connection CHECKS "pass" but there seems to be some intermittent glitch because the web apps won't connect and the firmware upgrade connection times out.  I suspected network issues, but the Viera TV, my PC's, and our phones all work fine in the same room.  Does anybody know the tricks with this particular player, or is there a common issue?  

I checked the Panasonic site but all I found was typical stuff I've already tried:  do the advanced setup, move the wireless router, cold boot the player...  I could load the firmware upgrade from CD, but if the Wifi or the network card is bad that wouldn't help.  

[marz]

Update:  Did a firmware update using a disk.  Purchased a new Wireless Router recommended by Best Buy.  Works fine - but the Blue Ray connection still fails.  Tried reconfiguring the old router as an extender.  No go.   Planning to try a range extender next, I guess.  This is really frustrating.  I can't believe we paid all that money for a set up and yet I've got about 40 hours into debugging, two more trips to Best Buy... the Geek Squad left it in the midst of a (failed) frimware update without ever testing the connection.  I really don't want to take another day off to wait for them to figure out I need to buy more gear.  Kind of thinking about renting a truck and dumping the whole works at the front door.   

[Dval]

Might just be mistaken, but for some reason I didn't think that the BD87 had built-in wireless.  If it does, I'd recommend exchanging it for another.  Personally, I usually just recommend a powerline ethernet adapter.  It essentially turns your power outlet into an internet connection and guarantees that you get a strong signal by maintening that hardline connection.