We’re in the process of building a workshop in our yard, roughly 100’ from the house. We’ll need internet out there and it seems to me the easiest way is with a good strong router or repeater - if I’m using the right terminology.
The building is a pole barn with steel walls, if that makes a difference, and the computers will be located along the wall closest to the house. There’s a window along that wall.
How should we do this? What should we consider? Is this a DIY for semi-computer literate folk or should we consult our local computer geeks? I don’t want to go cheap, but I don’t want to buy more than we need - like the one thing I saw that claims an 8 mile range - that’s just a bit of overkill.
It will be much more reliable to position an access point in the workshop and either use a wired uplink or dedicated wireless point-to-point uplink, rather than try to broadcast from the main house, both in the general case and your case of having metal walls in the workshop.
I would install a wireless access point in the new building connected with “direct burial” network cable, and let the router in the house do the routing.
Cat5/Cat6 has a maximum length of 100m, so you are well within the limits of a buried cable. And the connection will likely much faster and more reliable than if you were using some wireless backhaul channel to get the signal to the barn.
Set up a wireless access point in the barn, give it the same wireless network ID as those in the house and your devices should be able to hop from one to the other as you go between the house and the barn.
You might even have an old wireless router kicking around somewhere that could be pressed into service as a pure wireless access point (i.e. router features disabled). Just search for the your router’s model and “configure as wireless access point” and someone will have posted the instructions for configuring your device.
Also agree with the cable. I’ve been trying to figure out a route to do this myself. Don’t have a serious pressing need, just wifi security cameras in that area would be nice. My shed is by the road at the end of my driveway 125’ from the house. Benefit of the buried cable would be the ability to just unplug the data signal if someone is able to acquire and use your signal.
If it is feasible in any way: lay a cable and put a AP (wireless access point) on the end. You will have decent WiFi all over your property and have some infrastructure in place if you decide you need cameras or whatever.
Use cat5e or better.
The alternative (point to point WiFi) will eat into your WiFi spectrum in your house and will be more costly. (And never be quite as good)
It receives the wifi signal from a router and retransmits it as a different access point name. For example, my home router wifi name is is Skynet and the extender wifi name is Skynet_EXT.
Metal on your building is bad for reception but if you can put an extender near the window facing the house 100’ should be doable. If not a directional Yagi antenna pointed at your house should help:
I don’t think will work very well. It is called “seamless handoff” or “fast roaming” which is apparently not well implemented between most WiFi devices and access points. There are proprietary versions of seamless handoff which are used by some mesh routers and that works well.
On their higher end products, Ubiquiti has a rack-mounted management device that manages seamless handoff between their own access points and WiFi clients.
Re how to reach the OP’s workshop 100 ft. behind his house, it’s possible using an external directional WiFi antenna might work. I haven’t used any of these but they are standard products for this application. This assumes his household WiFi router has a removable antenna.
ISP-provided modem/routers don’t usually have external antennas and frequently don’t have great WiFi performance. Just adding a good quality external router or access point might be sufficient to reach the workshop. If not that would likely provide an external antenna connection to which a directional antenna could be attached.
Agreed, but it can work better than one might expect with home networks–and this is the way my home was set up for years. I also set up our kids small school with three or four WAPs that worked in this fashion for a few years…if you are on a budget and have some aging routers kicking around, it will work in a pinch.
This arrangement does have its flaky moments, but that can be mitigated by creating different wireless networks entirely and letting your devices hop between “fairyhome” and “fairybarn” as you walk between them.
I went over to a Eero mesh network in my home a couple of years ago and never looked back–that is a quite expensive option but it works well.
ETA: if money is not a concern, I would highly recommend using the Eero devices with ethernet backhaul between the house and barn. Not cheap, but it is rock solid and has lots of nice bells and whistles. But if one just wants to get wifi in the barn on the cheap, use an old router as a WAP.
If they are going through the trouble to run power to it, running a length of cat6 alongside it should not be too much and is the best way. If for some reason that does not work, your next best bet is powerline adapter. Get a good one, and make sure you connect both ends to the same circuit if possible.
If they’re pulling a separate drop from the pole, you’re screwed either way, but I echo the sentiment of others that extended range wifi and range extenders tend to be unreliable.
You need to be careful running cat5 between buildings. You need to avoid running it alongside a power run, and you need to be sure about galvanic isolation - individual buildings can sit at different potentials to one another. Signal carrying cables can see unwelcome problems.
Given such a short distance I would go for a simple ethernet over power adaptor and just connect it to a WiFi base station in the workshop. Reticulate all the protocols back to the main house router (DHCP etc) and you will be golden.
No poles in our neighborhood - everything is underground. A new transformer is being installed near the barn but the cable comes from the front of our lot. Word I’ve gotten second-hand - the cable company will run a line to the barn, no charge since it’s under 400’. If that’s the case, it sounds like that’s the way to go.
I appreciate all the answers, but honestly, some of them could have been written in Swahili, for as much as I understood. I’ve tried reading various sources, but my electronics training was in 1973 and we still learned vacuum tubes. I feel like I should tell you to get off my lawn with your new-fangled jargon! And I think we’ll let the cable company take care of us.
And I think we’ll let the cable company take care of us.