How to get signal from house next door?(with permission)

Dony

As it happens I ended up building a house next door to my parents which is only about 20 yards away down the road from mine.
At the moment I'm on 3's less than wonderful broadband and I've just about had enough of it.
They have an eircom landline and a 3mb connection which they barely use and they suggested if there was any way I could share their signal wirelessly.
When I'm in my own house and do a search for new connections on my laptop it unfortunately doesn't pick up their signal.
They have one of those eircom routers with two aerials and they have it located at the end of their house which is furthest from mine.
I can pick up their signal when I'm outside their house but as soon as I get near or go inside my own house, I loose their signal.
So here comes the question.
How do I go about boosting their signal or do I need to get some sort of better router/receiver for my end?
Ta

Some_Person

Nanostation 2 can connect as a client, then connect to it with your computer using an ethernet cable.

nilhg

To be sure, 20 yards of CAT5 cable, if you don't want to go that way then you are looking at either moving the DSL modem nearer to you in your parents house or buying a modem/router with much more reach, really ther is no magic easy solution.

Dony

nilhg wrote: »

To be sure, 20 yards of CAT5 cable, if you don't want to go that way then you are looking at either moving the DSL modem nearer to you in your parents house or buying a modem/router with much more reach, really ther is no magic easy solution.

Thanks for your suggestions.
I suppose moving their router closer towards my house could be possible.
So can you suggest a router that would offer much more reach?

nilhg

Dony wrote: »

Thanks for your suggestions.
I suppose moving their router closer towards my house could be possible.
So can you suggest a router that would offer much more reach?

Fortunately I've not had the same problems as you so I've no direct experience to guide you, some of the others here may have.
Don't forget wireless connections are two way, if you upgrade the modem/router you'll have to do the same with your laptop ( think of you shouting at a far away man with a megaphone), at least you may have to get a wireless USB stick for it.

if you could figure out a way to run the cable it'd be the best solution.

Dony

nilhg wrote: »

To be sure, 20 yards of CAT5 cable, if you don't want to go that way then you are looking at either moving the DSL modem nearer to you in your parents house or buying a modem/router with much more reach, really ther is no magic easy solution.

Ok so if I did end up managing to get 20 yards or so of cat5 going into my own house, would I then need to directly connect my laptop to the end of this cable or could I connect some sort of wireless extender to send the singnal wirelessly throughout my own house?
I read somewhere that you can't have two routers from one phoneline.
Ta

jor el

You can't have 2 modems on one line, but you can put a wifi router on that cable. It can't be a modem/router, just a plain wireless router. You connect that cable to the router's WAN input, and set up everything else as normal.

You'd need to make the range of IP addresses given out by your router different to the other one. If the parent's router works on 192.168.1.xxx, then your router's WAN side will have an address in that range, but it's LAN side should be different, like 192.168.2.xxx, for example.

nilhg

You don't have to put a router on the end of the cable, a simple wireless access point will do, if you do it this way it'll be easier to share content or back up between the two houses.

Many wireless routers nowadays can be set to access point mode so you'll probably be able to do whatever suits best.

vectra

jor el wrote: »

You can't have 2 modems on one line, but you can put a wifi router on that cable. It can't be a modem/router, just a plain wireless router. You connect that cable to the router's WAN input, and set up everything else as normal.

You'd need to make the range of IP addresses given out by your router different to the other one. If the parent's router works on 192.168.1.xxx, then your router's WAN side will have an address in that range, but it's LAN side should be different, like 192.168.2.xxx, for example.

As it happens you will see in my sig I have exactly that for sale

Johnboy1951

You could try putting a second router into your parents house, located as close as possible to your house, and connect the WAN port of the new router to a LAN port of their router.

You may then be able to connect to the new router wirelessly from your house.

If that failed then you could fit the ethernet cable from your parents router to your house and attach the new router in your house and connect to it wired or wirelessly.

You should be able to connect the new router 'through' the existing one, in bridge mode, which would give your router a different IP address to that of your parents router. That would keep the two connections as separated as possible.

jakedixon2004

I had a crazy idea a few months ago on this very subject. (INB4 "it wont work")
You could buy a decent USB wifi receiver and then make a sort of satellite with it. All you would need is a salad bowl, some tin foil and tape. If you cover the inside of the salad bowl with tin foil and then suspend the USB dongle with the tape in the middle of the bowl, the signal received should be better. You could also increase the signal output from ur parents router by buying a more powerful antenna and hopefully it should pick up the signal

benmeade

In essence what Dony idealy wants to do is extend the distance of wifi over a wider area(in to his house from next door) with the least amount of fuss.
I have 2 Netgear wnr834b routers running in my house connected wirelessly and both giving out a wifi signal and they will also work for hard wired connections to laptops and printers etc.

Now the wnr834b's have the option to be used as a base station or a wireless repeater which is dogged with problems (just do a google search on"wnr834 no internet in wireless repeat" or simular) and i for one never got it working.The wnr834b claims to be able to repeat the signal to up to 4 other wnr834b's however this would mean 4 of them circulated round one base station.Not much good for daisy chaining in a line!!

So how did i do it i hear you all ask.
I changed the firmware in 1 of the routers to something called DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This firmware can be flashed on to lots of routers
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
After flashing the router and logging on to the GUI from 192.168.1.1 and a few easy steps later you will have the 2 routers daisy chained.
Here is the link to the steps i used
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10594/Using-NETGEAR-WGR614L-with-DD-WRT-As-A-Wireless-Repeater-Bridge/

You will notice that these steps are for a different netgear router to mine but the layout in the GUI is all the same to get the second routher to wireless repeat.

So forget about a cat5 cable and have less fuss with cables connecting from lan to wan.The beauty of this is that the 2 routers can be any make model as long as the second one will take dd-wrt.

Hope this helps

jay93

if possible move the router closest as you can towrd your own house and aim the antenna of the modem in your direction this is the only thing i can think of.. :D

measurement

Just an additional suggestion..... If you end up adding a wireless router at your end, why not make it one that has a print server built in, so that you can leave your printer near the router, but can put your computer anywhere (particularly good if its a laptop).
There are several on the market (Belkin, D-Link etc.) but some of them are not yet fully compatible with Windows 7. I have had to add my Win 7 laptop to the network as 'additional' but added the printer to the router using an XP laptop.
The printer is then connected to the router via USB, not to a computer, but to do that, you MUST have a print server in the router.

sdanseo

The other thing you could do - not really what you want but just a suggestion - is get your own broadband? For €2 more than you were paying 3 per month you could have NTL 5Mb http://www.upc.ie/broadband/

Dony

benmeade wrote: »

In essence what Dony idealy wants to do is extend the distance of wifi over a wider area(in to his house from next door) with the least amount of fuss.
I have 2 Netgear wnr834b routers running in my house connected wirelessly and both giving out a wifi signal and they will also work for hard wired connections to laptops and printers etc.

Now the wnr834b's have the option to be used as a base station or a wireless repeater which is dogged with problems (just do a google search on"wnr834 no internet in wireless repeat" or simular) and i for one never got it working.The wnr834b claims to be able to repeat the signal to up to 4 other wnr834b's however this would mean 4 of them circulated round one base station.Not much good for daisy chaining in a line!!

So how did i do it i hear you all ask.
I changed the firmware in 1 of the routers to something called DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This firmware can be flashed on to lots of routers
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
After flashing the router and logging on to the GUI from 192.168.1.1 and a few easy steps later you will have the 2 routers daisy chained.
Here is the link to the steps i used
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10594/Using-NETGEAR-WGR614L-with-DD-WRT-As-A-Wireless-Repeater-Bridge/

You will notice that these steps are for a different netgear router to mine but the layout in the GUI is all the same to get the second routher to wireless repeat.

So forget about a cat5 cable and have less fuss with cables connecting from lan to wan.The beauty of this is that the 2 routers can be any make model as long as the second one will take dd-wrt.

Hope this helps

This works a TREAT.
No cables running to my house at all and wi-fi throughout.
Moved their modem/router closer to my house and by using a second netgear rangemax router that I got flashed using the dd-wrt software, it now picks up their eircom netopia modem/router signal wirelessly and it bounces it throughout my house. No noticable lag that I can detect. Netgear router is located in my house.
Nice one, happy days!

VERYinterested

Posts like this restore my faith in humanity and Boards.ie! Fair play to both of you, Benmeade for the suggestion and Dony for confirming it works. Great stuff lads, well done.

benmeade

benmeade wrote: »

In essence what Dony idealy wants to do is extend the distance of wifi over a wider area(in to his house from next door) with the least amount of fuss.
I have 2 Netgear wnr834b routers running in my house connected wirelessly and both giving out a wifi signal and they will also work for hard wired connections to laptops and printers etc.

Now the wnr834b's have the option to be used as a base station or a wireless repeater which is dogged with problems (just do a google search on"wnr834 no internet in wireless repeat" or simular) and i for one never got it working.The wnr834b claims to be able to repeat the signal to up to 4 other wnr834b's however this would mean 4 of them circulated round one base station.Not much good for daisy chaining in a line!!

So how did i do it i hear you all ask.
I changed the firmware in 1 of the routers to something called DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This firmware can be flashed on to lots of routers
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
After flashing the router and logging on to the GUI from 192.168.1.1 and a few easy steps later you will have the 2 routers daisy chained.
Here is the link to the steps i used
http://www.myopenrouter.com/article/10594/Using-NETGEAR-WGR614L-with-DD-WRT-As-A-Wireless-Repeater-Bridge/

You will notice that these steps are for a different netgear router to mine but the layout in the GUI is all the same to get the second routher to wireless repeat.

So forget about a cat5 cable and have less fuss with cables connecting from lan to wan.The beauty of this is that the 2 routers can be any make model as long as the second one will take dd-wrt.

Hope this helps

Here is a link to a better step by step guide after flashing your router
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge

I've done this a couple of times now so if anyone needs help then just ask.
Although i'm no IT professional i'll do my best.