Extending wireless range with an amplifier

Ampman

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Jun 11, 2014
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I have an old plaster and lathe house which was wired with Cat5e cable terminating in the corner of the basement. I have spotty wireless on the 2nd floor not bad but annoying at times when my devices drop the network.

I still use the wired LAN for my 2 PC's and a Smart TV (best data transfer rate) so I do not want to move the wireless router with 4 LAN ports from the basement but was thinking of moving the antenna up to the top of the basement stairwell on the 1st floor and a little more center of the house.

My Questions:
What effect would the following have on speed and range?
Are inline wireless amplifiers any good?
Any other comments on this method of increasing my range / speed and fixing my issue??

Hardware change:

-- 10 ft Cable to get to the top of the stairwell
-- Either a 2 Watt or 5 Watt 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Signal Booster Broadband Amplifier (to eliminate signal / speed loss due to the length of the cable and increase range of the antenna)
-- New 18dbi antenna (replace the standard 5dbi antenna)
 
You would be much better off running a ethernet cable up the stairwell and then put a AP/router on the end. Ethernet can deliver at 100m distance with no loss.

Microwave cable has huge loss per foot unless you buy very expensive stuff. Amplifiers tend to amplify noise and interference along with the actual signal. Once that can deliver even 1 watt cleanly are extremely expensive. It is illegal to transmit over 1w of power with some exception. Also transmission is only half the problem your end PC may hear the signal but they can not transmit strong enough to return the signal many times.

A 18db gain antenna is likely a directional antenna. These work well for sending the signal to a very small area. Using them inside a house likely would not be very effective. The beam is quite narrow on many of these antenna. A 15db gain omni directional antenna is almost 6ft long so it is not something you could realistically consider using indoors. Be very careful many of the very cheap antenna lie about the gain. You want ones that show the power distribution graphs with things like the side lobes depicted. This show the company actually designs antenna rather than putting big numbers to con people.

Although your plan may help a little it is a lot of effort and you likely will still not get good signal on the top floor. I would see if you could get ethernet run all the way and put a AP on the second floor or consider using powerline network equipment to extend the network
 

Pooneil

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Apr 15, 2013
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It is a simple matter to put an additional WiFi access point at the other ends of those ethernet cables, such as near the TV or PCs, without moving the router. That is almost always the preferred option to improving your WiFi access.
 

Pooneil

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The first link is $110. You could buy two decent access point for that, and "works at B, G or Super G speeds" Not N, which is what you want. The second link is for "B/G" too and is sold out. Increasing the base signal does not necessarily increase the WiFi range because the "bull horn" router still has to hear the soft spoken devices talking back to it.

Are your TV and computers in the basement too? If not, then an adding access points is the simplest strategy to improve your home WiFi.
 

Ampman

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Jun 11, 2014
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I would like to thank all who posted on this topic. I will be adding an access point to the 2nd floor via ethernet cable. sounds like that is the best way to go.
 

Pooneil

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Good plan. Make sure to use different channels for each from among 1, 6 & 11. Whatever you neighbors are not using. It is my preference to have the SSID and encryption be the same on all access points, so as users walk around the house the devices will switch to the stronger signal more easily.