MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
We've recently rejigged the layout of Flying Ox Towers and I now have a little workspace/study at the far end of the kitchen/diner. The BT connection and therefore internet router is at one end of the house and my workspace is at the opposite end, with a 1m thick stone wall roughly half way inbetween. Total distance is about 25m between where the router is and where I need a signal (it's a long but very thin house). I've got a plug-in Belkin thingy which just about works but the wifi signal can be intermittent. I've tried one of those powerline adapter kits but the sockets I need to use are on different circuits and it doesn't seem to work too well. Could STW point me in the direction of a more robust solution?
Run of CAT-5 through/around the wall to a 2nd access point!
run a cable
Ummm... this CAT-5 stuff. Would that be OK run round the outside of the house? I'm trying to avoid any more upset inside. It's old, concrete floor slabs, horsehair plaster walls straight onto stone, that kind of thing, so internal routing would be quite messy.
this CAT-5 stuff. Would that be OK run round the outside of the house?
I'd get the beefier stuff, but it'd be fine.
I ran a standard domestic Cat 5 from the lounge up an outside wall to my office - it's been fine for nearly 10 years now. Just drilled through the window frames and fed it through then sealed it all with some white frame sealant.
External Cat-5 is a better option but if you can't do that you probably need to invest in a mesh network and end up with it daisy-chained (a mesh node either side of the wall might be enough, although you might need them by a doorway). They don't come cheap though (look at Google Mesh for ease of setup, although I haven't actually used it myself)
We’ve done what fuzzy suggests. Google wifi with three nodes, the intermediate one has line of sight to the other two, thus bouncing signal past the obstruction. Not as fast as CAT5e, but not as bad as you might expect either. Pretty simple to set up.
Long term well get wires in, but this is fine for now
Powerlines should work OK - make sure they aren't plugged into a smoothing distribution extension like you might have for the router / pc - they don't like them.
I have a wall that appears to be a Faraday cage for the rest of the building, so use Powerline adaptors to add extra hot spots.
Mesh network using BT Whole Home wifi:
https://www.shop.bt.com/learnmore/bt-branded-products-and-services/bt-whole-home-wi-fi/
I have a similar issue due to multiple brick walls and a chimney breast inbetween the router and the orangery. I put a TP link in and it works a treat. Get wifi all the way to the end of the garden now
We had dead spots in the corners of our place..
YEsterday I set up the Netgear Orbi - really impressed with the coverage and speed.
Not cheap at £300 for router and satellite, but looks neat, adn happily getting 2-3 times the WIFI speed of the old plusnet router too..
DrP
Home plug is your answer. Tplink stuff all works well.
Dont get non homeplug WiFi extendors, they're crap.
This basic kit is all you need
You can add more if you want