Why not? An ethernet cable can be up to 100m long, which is plenty long enough to be routed round doors and an intervening corridor. I have a cable going from my router to my study and it’s routed round three doors and the intervening corridor. Just make sure the cable doesn’t get pinched by any doorway.
Good point. Alternatively, the cable (if this is a cable modem) could be extended to the other room and the modem/router relocated there. It might actually be easier to run cable unobtrusively than Cat-5 style Ethernet. Cable technicians have this down to an art form.
He alerad
Also, makers like DLINK , LINKSYS,etc stopped making seperate devices for the different jobs.
To be clear, a “wireless bridge” is a pair of devices, designed to bridge ethernet to ethernet, via wireless. Their wireless would be 1:1 … point to point… a pair…
(or if they work as 3 or 4… all the nodes must be same model , or Brand or protocol of bridging , in the same MODE… bridge mode…
However , the OP only needs a “client bridge”. that is, it puts the local ethernet onto the LAN of the wireless access point. (The wireless access point provided by the “broadband router” or “wireless modem” , “modem”, “router”… is ok, that wireless… )
Now which device does he want to buy for use out of the box (turn key) ? The cheapest access points may also have client bridge mode. These may be only found in the alternative models, perhaps the linksys (as they were famous for it, and they sell it for the advanced DD- WRT use ! )
Edimax and other cheap brands may have the cheap client bridge.
Ironically in many brands the device capable of client bridge is more expensive than the “wireless router”… The client is more expensive than the server ! That is because they only put client bridge into devices which also have bridging (for many hosts… the client bridge mode is limited eg to 3 or 4 hosts.)
I want to thank everyone for their input. I suppose I could run a permanent wire (at the moment I have a wire just running across the floor from one room to the other) but to do it neatly takes more skill and talent than I possess. I did some shopping and ended up with the Netgear device linked above. It had turned up in the searches I did prior to posting this but I was not 100% sure it would do what I needed. I looked into the USB adapters but the cost wasn’t that much cheaper and the Netgear device provides additional ports which I can find useful.
The PC is 5 years old (but still holds up fine; I over bought at the time to plan for the future). I suspect if I bought it just a little bit later I probably would have gotten WiFi built in but right now it just has an Ethernet card.
Yes, they exist. I just purchased this one from Netgear to get some Ethernet-only devices on a different floor connected to my home network without running wires.
Seriously, just use a USB adapter. $9 and you’re good to go.
Otherwise, what you need is a wireless client like this $14 one. It plugs into an outlet near your computer, talks to your wireless router, and then sends that signal over an ethernet cable connected between it and your computer. However, this is a lot more hassle to set up than a USB wifi adapter, and offers virtually no benefit unless your computer is so old that it doesn’t have USB 2.0.
Some people above have mentioned repeaters/range extenders and routers. Don’t get those; they’re not the best tool for the job. Repeaters will generally cause more interference (competing for the wireless spectrum) and slow everything down. Routers will take quite a bit of configuration to get working in client mode, and most consumer ones do not do this out of the box.
There’s a very good chance you can just use a USB WiFi adapter like the rest of the world and be done with it. If you really, really, really care about squeezing every last bit of speed and reliability out of your connection, skip WiFi altogether and use powerline networking, which creates a network through your home’s existing electricity wiring across rooms. There’s likely less interference in your power lines than in your neighborhood’s WiFi spectrum, and for an even cleaner signal, there’s also a filtered model for a few dollars more.