Need help planning a wifi network for a large house

conzy

I was out in the Uncle's house today and his current wifi setup is a disaster, they can currently only get it in one room. So hes fed up and wants it sorted and money is no object he says! :P

Its a large 3 story house and I was thinking of setting up two Wifi N access points connected using a powerline adapter and getting a good Wifi N dongle for the laptop.

Just looking for some recommendations on components and other possible configurations. The current access point is a Belkin F5D8235-4 and its either a complete pos or its broken because the range is literally 5 metres and then its just gone, it doesn't degrade slowly as you would expect.

Whats the bee's knees when it comes to home networking at the minute? I always liked linksys and netgear.


Thanks

edanto

Personally, I'm a big fan of the e3000 for situations like that, and I've installed scores of them.

They pair up very well, you just configure each WAP with the same SSID/security, but on different channels (use something like WiEye on your Android to see what channels the neighbours are using, and avoid).

End result is a nice strong WiFi signal around the house, and a laptop can move seamlessly from one WAP to another with nothing apparent to the user. Depending on the construction of the house, you might be fine with two of them, one in the centre of the ground floor and one above it on the first floor.

You can also connect a hard drive to one of the e3000 by USB and have the content of that available across the network, or use it as a backup location etc.

Edit: I'd only use the powerline/homeplug if I really had to. Far preferable (to me) to run cables invisibly. You can bridge them wirelessly too, but that involves replacing the firmware & I'd have to charge for that advice ;-)

PogMoThoin

Try changing channels on the Belkin, see if the signal improves. Belkin make terrible networking products, but usually their wireless signal is good, they just fail at routing properly. Get inssider on your laptop and see what channels are in use nearby. If you introduce more wireless devices in his house you're going to have to be very careful of channel overlaps. The 3 non-overlapping channels are 1, 6 and 11.

Video senders, baby monitors, wireless camera's etc will all interfere but may not show up in inssider.

Nothingbetter2d

edanto wrote: »

Personally, I'm a big fan of the e3000 for situations like that, and I've installed scores of them.

They pair up very well, you just configure each WAP with the same SSID/security, but on different channels (use something like WiEye on your Android to see what channels the neighbours are using, and avoid).

End result is a nice strong WiFi signal around the house, and a laptop can move seamlessly from one WAP to another with nothing apparent to the user. Depending on the construction of the house, you might be fine with two of them, one in the centre of the ground floor and one above it on the first floor.

You can also connect a hard drive to one of the e3000 by USB and have the content of that available across the network, or use it as a backup location etc.

Edit: I'd only use the powerline/homeplug if I really had to. Far preferable (to me) to run cables invisibly. You can bridge them wirelessly too, but that involves replacing the firmware & I'd have to charge for that advice ;-)

bridging wirelessly has its own set of drawbacks too. I too have a router with the dd-wrt firmware on it. in wireless bridge mode u lose 50% of the throughput resulting in a slow connection speed.

edanto

Absolutely. But for those time when you can't run a cable or homeplugs and your main limit is the broadband upload/download... it's the mutts nuts.