Hi,
After trying most things and spending money like water, I still cannot get our home network to be adequate and I am out of options - hope someone can help.
Situation:
> We rent our house (so it makes no sense to splash out getting Cat 6 installed)
> It's a very old house with very thick walls, thick floors, large rooms
> The actual internal ingress (from the service provider) is into the home office, which is on the top floor of the house. This is perfect for the workstation I use up there, but means that the wireless router is a long way from the living floor where we need to have good, fast wifi
> So I can't use a wired ethernet (no wire) and wifi doesn't carry well enough
> The house configuration is a living floor on the 2nd floor, electric switchboard on the ground floor, bedrooms on the 3rd floor, office (where the internet connection comes in) on the 4th floor
> The big challenge is to get fast reliable wifi on the second floor, when there is no wire from 2nd to 4th and wifi doesn't work
I have tried a lot of things:
1. Tried using two 100MBit/s Netgear routers "bouncing" signal to each other (Wireless Repeating Function). Not ideal as security is small and speed was slow (<10MBit/s) but at least it worked. However these routers had to get pensioned off when we put gigabit ethernet in the office - and the Netgear replacements (a) still have the security limitations with wireless repeating, (b) anyway see to do a worse job of repeating.
2. Tried buying Netgear directional high-gain antennas and directing the signal point to point to a second router - didn't work at all.
3. Tried Powerline (this was in 2008). It sort-of worked but was unreliable and dog slow. I think this is probably not helped by the fact that this building is OLD, most of the wiring is OLD, and anyway the electrical path would take the signal from the 4th floor, down some very old wiring to the ground floor, across a very old switchboard, and back up to the second floor... it's not quite the same as a modern house with modern wiring.
4. Most recently tried using Netgear's Wireless Network Extender. Again, it sort of works, but it's NOT fast at all. In addition there are times when some of our computers using the extension segment of the network are unable to connect - they can still see 3-4 bars of signal, but they cannot get on the network. Appears to be an issue relating to gateway, or DNS, not sure. But I would say about 1 day in 3, when I come home, my wife tells me that the "internet is off".
HELP!
I had a few thoughts but no idea if any of this is any more likely to work:
Have powerline devices improved since 2008? Which is the best? Keeping in mind I am NOT bothered about trying to get 500Mbit/s working, for me I need the device which is best at working at a reasonable speed over crappy old wiring and a long distance, rather than super-fast on modern home wiring. I am pre-disposed against Netgear just because I feel I've spent SO much trying to get a Netgear solution to work - they've had enough of my money.
[ii] Is there a better way to "bounce" wifi through the house with shorter bounces, so that there is less loss for each bounce?
That's about all I can think of. Any help much appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Alastair
After trying most things and spending money like water, I still cannot get our home network to be adequate and I am out of options - hope someone can help.
Situation:
> We rent our house (so it makes no sense to splash out getting Cat 6 installed)
> It's a very old house with very thick walls, thick floors, large rooms
> The actual internal ingress (from the service provider) is into the home office, which is on the top floor of the house. This is perfect for the workstation I use up there, but means that the wireless router is a long way from the living floor where we need to have good, fast wifi
> So I can't use a wired ethernet (no wire) and wifi doesn't carry well enough
> The house configuration is a living floor on the 2nd floor, electric switchboard on the ground floor, bedrooms on the 3rd floor, office (where the internet connection comes in) on the 4th floor
> The big challenge is to get fast reliable wifi on the second floor, when there is no wire from 2nd to 4th and wifi doesn't work
I have tried a lot of things:
1. Tried using two 100MBit/s Netgear routers "bouncing" signal to each other (Wireless Repeating Function). Not ideal as security is small and speed was slow (<10MBit/s) but at least it worked. However these routers had to get pensioned off when we put gigabit ethernet in the office - and the Netgear replacements (a) still have the security limitations with wireless repeating, (b) anyway see to do a worse job of repeating.
2. Tried buying Netgear directional high-gain antennas and directing the signal point to point to a second router - didn't work at all.
3. Tried Powerline (this was in 2008). It sort-of worked but was unreliable and dog slow. I think this is probably not helped by the fact that this building is OLD, most of the wiring is OLD, and anyway the electrical path would take the signal from the 4th floor, down some very old wiring to the ground floor, across a very old switchboard, and back up to the second floor... it's not quite the same as a modern house with modern wiring.
4. Most recently tried using Netgear's Wireless Network Extender. Again, it sort of works, but it's NOT fast at all. In addition there are times when some of our computers using the extension segment of the network are unable to connect - they can still see 3-4 bars of signal, but they cannot get on the network. Appears to be an issue relating to gateway, or DNS, not sure. But I would say about 1 day in 3, when I come home, my wife tells me that the "internet is off".
HELP!
I had a few thoughts but no idea if any of this is any more likely to work:
Have powerline devices improved since 2008? Which is the best? Keeping in mind I am NOT bothered about trying to get 500Mbit/s working, for me I need the device which is best at working at a reasonable speed over crappy old wiring and a long distance, rather than super-fast on modern home wiring. I am pre-disposed against Netgear just because I feel I've spent SO much trying to get a Netgear solution to work - they've had enough of my money.
[ii] Is there a better way to "bounce" wifi through the house with shorter bounces, so that there is less loss for each bounce?
That's about all I can think of. Any help much appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Alastair
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