Home networking problem (and solutions)

In My Humble Opinion
1

The problem, in short, is that our internet comes into the house in the bedroom in the NE corner of the house, so that’s where the gateway and router sit. My home office is in a finished bedroom in the basement at the opposite corner (SW) of the house, about 35 feet away. (It’s a one story house, and the rest of the basement is unfinished.) The wifi signal down there is not very good, so I’ve been thinking of ways to get a better signal.

My first thought was to get a wifi range extender, and put it somewhere in the kitchen, which is right above the office in the basement. But when I read about range extenders, they said it basically cuts your network speed in half, because your device talks to the extender and then the extender talks to the router, so the traffic in each direction is basically making two hops instead of one. And one article I read said “Maybe what you need is a mesh network.”

So then I started looking at mesh networks, thinking a two node network would work if I put a node in the kitchen instead of a range extender, and I should still be able to pick up a signal directly below in the basement.

So yesterday I was watching a YouTube video where a guy was talking about the different kinds of mesh networks (6, 6E, and 7), how to set one up, etc. He was discussing how the nodes communicate with each other and said they can communicate wirelessly, or if your house is wired for ethernet they can use that. Then he mentioned that you can also use the old coaxial cable wiring in your house by using a coax to ethernet converter. And I thought, that’s great because there’s a cable outlet in the office downstairs, so I could actually put the second mesh node downstairs in the office, wired through the coax, instead of a wireless node upstairs.

But then I thought, at that point why would I even need a mesh network? Just get a pair of the coax converters, attach one between the router and cable outlet upstairs, then connect another one to the cable outlet downstairs, then just run an ethernet cable to my laptop and I don’t even need to worry about wifi anymore.

So, is the solution really that simple, or am I missing something obvious?

2

Just a data point: I “installed” an Eero system a couple years ago and it has been great. Trouble-free and easily relocated.

And built-in nightlight!

ETA: my PS5 runs just fine off it.

3

Not really following you here. It sounds like you are considering two possible network topologies, but both alternatives are wireless, so what difference is it going to make? If you cannot reach the destination in one hop, the data is going to take strictly more than one hop either way.

However, how much of a gamer are you? The extra couple of milliseconds may not matter.

4

Yes, the solution really is that simple. If you have coax from your router to your office. That’s what I did.

I have a pair of these:

They work great.

5

What @Tatterdemalion said. Wired ethernet (MoCA or CAT5/6) is going to kick the crap out of even the best wifi setup. If that is an option, don’t even consider bothering with wifi meshes. Even the best enterprise setups won’t get you the latency, bandwidth, and reliability of a simple cable. Especially for gaming, the packet loss will be much much less over a cable.

On the other hand, if you’re just browsing the web and checking email and such, I think any solution would be just fine, even the $5 range extender you find on Craigslist. The added latency of additional hops won’t be noticeable for web browsing (we’re talking milliseconds).

If you often stream 4k content or download large files, bandwidth starts to become a consideration too… basically, your home network just has to be faster than the speed you pay for from your ISP. Under 100 Mbps, even decade-old used equipment will be fine. 100-300 Mbps, you might have to be more restrictive. Gigabit (1000 Mbps+), it gets very hard to do… I’ve never seen ANY wifi setup able to sustain 1000 Mbps over the air, even though they often claim to, and even if I’m right next to it. That is trivial for a wired connection, though.

TLDR just used wired MoCA and call it a day.

Powerline networking is another option, but it’s inferior to MoCA (much slower/noisier).

6

I have tried this and it utterly failed. I am not 100% sure but it was in a modern home and I think the circuit box somehow blocked the signal (what else could it have been?).

I am dubious about MoCA too but it may work.

I have used mesh networks (Eero and Google’s version) and they are super easy to setup and work great.

I ONLY use wired networking for my main PC but for streaming to the TV and use on my cell phone the mesh network is more than enough.

Do the math for how many people you have in the home who all might be streaming their own thing but even then most wifi and modern networks can keep up unless you have a lot of people using it at once (then you are in a whole other realm).

50 mbps can be enough for a couple people to stream 4K video. I am willing to bet any wifi can do better than that and the limitation is your speed from the ISP you use.

7

This Wikipedia article (in the Drawbacks section) seems to indicate that a repeater/extender is basically a separate network that connects to your original network, and would require separate security setup, etc. So the repeater talks to your original router, and then your laptop or whatever talks to the repeater, so it’s double the network traffic. Whereas with a mesh network, all nodes are part of the same network. But since each of the remote nodes has to communicate with the base node, I agree that it does seem like a potato/potahto kind of thing.

8

IIRC an extender halves your wifi capacity that the extender serves. That may well be plenty to do what it needs. Something to consider though.

Wi-Fi extenders receive data from the router, then reroute the data to your connected device. They repeat this process with information coming from your device, routing it first to the extender and then back to the primary router. This extra step effectively halves your bandwidth, as the extender cannot “listen” to your device and send information back to the router at the same time. - SOURCE

9

Sounds like MoCA is the way to go. I would mostly be connecting my work laptop, but also occasionally a gaming laptop. (No online games, but even downloading updates from Steam can be slow.)

10

Just know MoCA needs a cable connection.

If you are in your backyard and want wifi MoCA won’t help. If you are in bed MoCA won’t help. You’ll need something else to broadcast the signal. You’ll have to setup nodes in lots of places.

Which is basically a cheap, not as good mesh network.

11

Generally our wifi around the house is just fine. It’s just the one room at the opposite corner of the house down in the basement where I want to get a better connection. And it has a cable outlet, so MoCA sounds like it should work.

12

No it doesn’t. MOCA works perfectly fine without a cable connection.

13

Huh? If you are not connected to cable then it is a wifi extender of some sort connected to a device connected to cable.

Back to using a mesh device. I’d only care for MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) if I want a direct, wired connection to the internet router. And still not sure that is better (it might be).

14

I think you don’t understand what MOCA is. It takes a twisted pair ethernet connection and runs it over a 75 ohm cable. That’s all. It can run parallel to a cable signal, or on it’s own. A cable connection is not required.

15

I don’t think there is actually a hard and fast difference between a “range extender” and a “mesh network node”… they’re both essentially wireless repeaters. Most of it is just marketing…

  • Some but not all mesh network devices offer a dedicated backhaul radio. Other, cheaper ones just use the same Wi-Fi radio that communicate with the client… those are essentially the same as wireless repeaters tied together by fancy app-based configurators.
  • Having a dedicated backhaul radio is better because it allows the node to talk to clients on one radio and to the “base station” (whether a dedicated router or just the mesh node that’s plugged into the modem) on the other radio.
  • It’s still best to hardwire each node (via CAT or MoCA) whenever possible, because it’s far more reliable and usually a lot faster than the wireless backhaul.
  • It’s not as simple as “repeaters halve your bandwidth and meshes don’t”… it really depends on the hardware radios, the protocols being used, the network speed from your ISP, etc. Most home cable connections are like 90% downstream and 10% up anyway, so what the repeaters/mesh nodes end up sending is the bulk of the data from the internet to your device, and a few tiny acknowledgments from your device back to the internet. It’s not a equal 50/50 split, so a half-duplex radio doesn’t necessarily cut your real-world speeds in half.

Generally speaking, repeaters won’t have a dedicated backhaul radio, and many higher-end/more expensive mesh devices will, but not necessarily. A cheaper mesh network is essentially a bunch of wireless repeaters bundled and configured together via an app.

You can also use some routers and wireless points similarly, whether “properly” (via enterprise setups, wiring, and protocols) or a DIY-style (combining together a bunch of cheap wifi routers with open/advanced firmware).

But at the end of the day it just comes down to the number of radios, the frequencies they can talk in, and the bandwidth that the hardware and software can reliably support. There’s a lot of variables and the devices will pretty much never give you their full advertised speed… it’s far cheaper and simpler to get max performance with cables (not cable internet, just cables through the wall/rooms).

But that really only matters at higher speeds (several hundred Mbps or higher), or where latency/packet loss really matters, like gaming or VOIP. Otherwise, for web browsing and email and such, it doesn’t really matter what you get. Lower bandwidths (< 100 Mbps) are easy to maximize even with devices from the 2000s and 2010s.

16

It seems to me that Whack-a-Mole might be talking about a generic “cable”, as in “coax cable”, not necessarily a “cable internet ISP”? Like if you’re using the laptop in bed or out in the yard, you’ll have to drag a length of cable with you (absent a wifi node).

To be fair, I was confused at first too.

17

Since your wifi is literally in the corner of your house, I think all you really need is a more directional antenna. You are wasting a lot of RF energy broadcasting in a uniform pattern that is mostly outside of your house. Get a directional antenna and aim it towards the SW corner of the house and you’ll have no need for a range extender, meshes, etc.

RF antennas receive in the same pattern as they transmit. In other words, if it boosts the signal that it transmits towards the SW corner of your house (at a cost of reduced signal in other directions), it will also receive better from the SW corner of your house (and more poorly from other directions), which is exactly what you want. You want it to transmit and receive better towards your office, at the cost of transmitting and receiving more poorly from your neighbor’s house.

18

This isn’t really true.

Let’s say you are on your laptop and you are reading the Straight Dope. The network request goes from your laptop to the range extender, then to the router, then to the internet company’s nearest router, to the internet company’s main trunk, to the internet company’s gateway to the rest of the internet, hops across some internet backbone (maybe several hops, depending on where you are), to the gateway to our hosting site, to the computer that actually serves up the Straight Dope web pages, then back again through all of those hops.

One extra hop doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.

Open up a command prompt and type “tracert boards.straightdope.com” and you will see what I mean. I just tried it on my system and it took 17 hops to get to the SDMB.

19

Except that it is sort of really true. It has nothing to do with the number of hops though. A WiFi AP or range extender has a finite amount of bandwidth. In mesh mode, half of the bandwidth is devoted to the backhaul from the AP to the router or other mesh device. Therefore only half the bandwidth is available to the client. Depending on what you are doing, and what WiFi protocols you are using, it may or may not be significant. But using an AP in mesh mode will reduce your available bandwidth. It may not reduce your ping time, but that’s a different thing.

20

This is a good explanation, thank you!