My parents live in the top 3 floors of a large 5 storey Georgian house in Edinburgh (all high cealings and solid walls). For reasons of domestic harmony, they choose to have their computers as far apart from each other as possible - my father’s is in the dinning room on the lowest floor whilst mother-dearest has hers in the guest-bedroom/office/artist-studio on the top floor. Not wanting to string cat-5 cable all over the place, they have a Netgear wireless router/adsl modem/firewall thingy. This is placed on the landing of the middle floor about equidistant from both machines. Unfortunately they get very variable connectivity and sometimes loose connection altogether from one or both machines.
Does anyone have experience of reliable solutions, preferably not too expensive, which can improve this? Bear in mind this is a ‘period’ house and so any solution would need to be quite discrete. I am thinking perhaps of an antenna extension from PC to stairwell where I hope the signal may be stronger.
i can think of three possibilites… none of them perfect, but they might help…
First, the one you gave, just moving the transmitter, or receivers, to someplace they might work better, like the stairway. But this means running some wires, and may still not work great.
Second, for many wireless routers (not sure of yours) you can buy upgraded antenna to boost the signal ($30-$60).
Third, and i think the most expensive/effective (about $100), you can buy a range expander, put it between the two computers, and it will boost the signal.
(note: the prices are from quick scans of CompUSA prices… they may, and probably will, be different for you)
I don’t know about Netgear, but Linksys makes a higher gain antenna that will boost your signal 3 fold (as Aserrann mentioned). Unless you have solid core walls I don’t see how you could be having signal problems in a single family residence though so I suppose the first thing I’d consider is simply getting a different Access Point as it seems the only you have is a bit underpowered. You could always get a more professional grade AP for that matter (Alvarion or Cisco both make commercial grade AP’s with 300+ foot radius access).
If you’re brave, there is third-party firmware for Linksys routers that lets you access transmit power settings. HyperWRT is one that comes to mind right now.
The same firmware can also let you take a cheap router (such as the WRT54G, often available for under $50) and use it as a repeater.
Well, you can, but the surgery is highly invasive and the implants often give persistent discomfort for many years. It’s best to try the procedure on only one parent at first, and then if you’re happy with the results, proceed with the other.
Warning: A bigger antenna typically implies omni-directional. That’s Bad in an apartment/house setting, but Good for e.g., a giant warehouse. You don’t want less signal going in more places, it’s just going to be an even crappier experience. Use the regular antennas they gave you and point them in the directions of the most typical use.
You could also be experiencing a wifi traffic jam. You could boost your signal but that’s going to upset your neighbors (because they will then experience what your currently experiencing). You could change channels but the ones you’d want to switch to are illegal for this use.
Best solution: Use wifi where it is inconvenient to have wires. E.g., run Cat-5 to each room and set up a router in each room. If you’re not doing a lot of home networking there’s no reason to go with wireless G, so you can get some pretty cheap “outdated” access points for this use.
Also, make sure your parents aren’t using a 2.4 GHz cordless phone that will likely conflict with the router. If there are neighbors living on the first two floors, their cordless phones might conflict with your parents’ router.
My wife and I had a very strong wireless connection all over our house from a Netgear wireless router. But all we had to do was press “talk” on our 2.4 GHz cordless phone, and we could watch the router begin resetting itself over and over again until we hung up the cordless.
We solved the problem by buying a 5.8 GHz cordless phone.
