Wireless router

[Ken Ibold]

I'm currently using a 5-year-old Linksys 2.4 gHz wireless B router to run my home network. I have four computers in an upstairs room and one computer in a home office that, unfortunately, is on the other side of the house. Currently I have the router in the family room more or less underneath the four computers upstairs, and they all get good signals. The office, however, gets a weak signal about 60 feet from the router. The router is as close as it can be to the mid point of the house.

So my question is ... is there a directional antenna or something I can hook into the office laptop to improve its signal reception? Would a newer router have more range? Should I just pull an ethernet cable to the office?

 

[SCCutler]

Ken:

My experience has been that some of the newer wifi devices are much more robust in their signal strength. Still, you must be in some serious palatial estate (grin), because your Linky should not have trouble punching a usable signal through the area of most homes. What is the distance from the router to the offending office?

As for antennas, no, unless you're using an external wifi device (a card, as opposed to an internal wifi modem), your laptop has no facility to connect an external antenna. You could *get* a different modem, with an external antenna jack, and plug in an antenna, and you'd be fine then, but that's a lot of trouble and expense. Or, you could use one of these: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=WL-6203-V1A-BP&cat=WLS

Another option would be to get these for the router: http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-High-Antenna-Connectors-HGA7T/dp/B0002F3G7M - I assume you have the ubiquitous WRT54G router.

You could also go with a repeater - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ork+-+Wireless+AP/Bridge-_-Linksys-_-33124359

But if you can just run a cable without too much pain, that would still be your best option.

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

I
So my question is ... is there a directional antenna or something

Do I have a directional antenna for you Ken! Spike will describe tech details!

 

[silver-eagle]

Wireless B? Time to upgrade. G/N work better but then, your computers need to support it too.
There's a number of DIY wifi boosters. Google can help you find them. There's also a number of commercial antenna that will do the same thing. LINKSYS has a couple that replace the existing antenna extending the length of them by a few inches and improving the signal strength on the receiving end by about 20%. There's also a few commercial entries that extend them a foot or more. One of the things I did was upgrade my WRT54G software using DD-WRT. I think I found out about it here. You can tweak the router to increase the signal strength, although I didn't need to as right out of the box it works better. I got a second router and used the bridging function to extend the network to a second wireless.
A few links:
http://www.cantenna.com/
http://www.wifi-link.com/set_ap.php?gclid=CN_Gvc7dr6UCFUdN4Aoda2MvZA
http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index
http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-High-Antenna-Connectors-HGA7T/dp/B0002F3G7M

 

[Areeda]

I have set up a few of these power line ethernet devices.

I have nothing but good things to say. Plug em in and they work. No setup. High speed (>200MBps) and reliable. Price on Amazon is about $120.

Joe

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

power line ethernet devices

I tried making one of those myself, don't do it! Terrible cloud of blue smoke in the office.

Hey, what are most router's bandwith limits? If you get 10 people sitting in the reception area, all loading stuff on their iphones, might you see a bottleneck at the router?

 

[Areeda]

Just a bit more on how I do it. My house is also too big or has too many walls to get wireless with one access point.

In my office downstairs, I have cable business class coming in and is wired to a bunch of crap. I also have a one-port power line adapter plugged in as the base.

Then in my bedroom at one end of the house is a 4 port power-line adapter that a wireless access point, Tivo, Verizon MiFi, and Blu-ray plugged in.

The other end Viveca has a desk with a second 4-port power line adapter with another Access Point on a different band, Verizon MiFi and her computer plugged in.

Everything else uses WiFi.

It works very well for us.

Joe

 

[Areeda]

I tried making one of those myself, don't do it! Terrible cloud of blue smoke in the office.

weird. I've installed about 10 of them. The only problem I had was at Diana's farm where it wouldn't reach from the house to the hangar. Never smoked one. (edit) Haven't smoked one yet.

Hey, what are most router's bandwith limits? If you get 10 people sitting in the reception area, all loading stuff on their iphones, might you see a bottleneck at the router?

My wireless N has a 54Mbps bandwidth. I can tell when multiple people are watching NetFlix and I transfer a big file from from a server in the house.

But most of the time it's the Internet connection speed that's the bottleneck. Mine is up to 15Mbps so it will get saturated way before the Access Point let alone the router.

Joe

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

weird. I've installed about 10 of them. The only problem I had was at Diana's farm where it wouldn't reach from the house to the hangar. Never smoked one.

(bad) joke, Joe. I tried to make one myself
forgot the !

Thanks for the router limits info.
Back to the originally scheduled thread!

 

[RJM62]

If you're losing signal at 60 feet, there's a chance there's something blocking the signal: a plaster wall, a heating duct, something in between the router and the office. In that case, a better router may not substantially improve things.

On the other hand, N has significantly better range, in my experience, and is faster than B anyway; so I think it may be time to buy a new router, anyway, just on general principles. To derive any real benefit, though, you'll have to buy a new card for at least the machine that you're having trouble reaching.

One thing to make sure of is not to enable encryption that's not supported by the oldest wireless adapter being served by the router. I get a few calls a month from people who buy a new router, configure it to use WPA2, and then find that only some of their computers can connect. The older ones don't have cards that support it.

Otherwise, just use my favorite solution and run a wire. Nothing's more dependable than a length of Ethernet cable.

-Rich

 

[gismo]

If you're losing signal at 60 feet, there's a chance there's something blocking the signal: a plaster wall, a heating duct, something in between the router and the office. In that case, a better router may not substantially improve things.

On the other hand, N has significantly better range, in my experience, and is faster than B anyway; so I think it may be time to buy a new router, anyway, just on general principles. To derive any real benefit, though, you'll have to buy a new card for at least the machine that you're having trouble reaching.

One thing to make sure of is not to enable encryption that's not supported by the oldest wireless adapter being served by the router. I get a few calls a month from people who buy a new router, configure it to use WPA2, and then find that only some of their computers can connect. The older ones don't have cards that support it.

Otherwise, just use my favorite solution and run a wire. Nothing's more dependable than a length of Ethernet cable.

-Rich

The security is in the driver/support software not the hardware AFaIK so updating the driver might provide WPA where none existed before.

I recently set up an old computer in my hangar to run a MagicJack which requires WinXP as a minimum. That computer didn't have Ethernet on the motherboard and the only adapter I had handy was a PCI wireless card which I'd been using in the slightly newer computer I was replacing. But when I first fired up after loading XP (original home edition) there was no support for the WPA security I'd been using. So I temporarily disabled wireless security on the router, downloaded and installed SP2 (which took the better part of a day) and after that the same card had WPA available. I assume that SP2 included an updated driver although it's also possible the WPA support is actually part of XP when SP2 or higher is installed.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Otherwise, just use my favorite solution and run a wire. Nothing's more dependable than a length of Ethernet cable.

Provided, of course, that length is shorter than 100 meters.

 

[RJM62]

The security is in the driver/support software not the hardware AFaIK so updating the driver might provide WPA where none existed before.

Sometimes. But the driver has to be available. I had an old adapter that wouldn't do WPA at all in Windows, and there was no updated driver available from the manufacturer. But it worked just fine in Linux because someone had gone to the trouble of writing a driver.

That was back a few years ago when WiFi cards with "official" Linux drivers were hard to come by. To do the same thing for Windows when hundreds of supported adapters are available off the shelf would be kind of counterproductive.

I recently set up an old computer in my hangar to run a MagicJack which requires WinXP as a minimum. That computer didn't have Ethernet on the motherboard and the only adapter I had handy was a PCI wireless card which I'd been using in the slightly newer computer I was replacing. But when I first fired up after loading XP (original home edition) there was no support for the WPA security I'd been using. So I temporarily disabled wireless security on the router, downloaded and installed SP2 (which took the better part of a day) and after that the same card had WPA available. I assume that SP2 included an updated driver although it's also possible the WPA support is actually part of XP when SP2 or higher is installed.

Windows XP SP0 and SP1 had no native support for WPA at all. A patch was released in 2003 (and is still available, by the way) which provided that support to SP0 and SP1 computers without installing the service pack. Support for WPA was also included in SP2.

Support for WPA2 wasn't included in SP2, but was made available via a series of patches and hotfixes (which I suppose are also still available, considering that the much older ones are), and also was included on SP3.

-Rich

 

[Ken Ibold]

If you're losing signal at 60 feet, there's a chance there's something blocking the signal: a plaster wall, a heating duct, something in between the router and the office. In that case, a better router may not substantially improve things.

Ding ding ding! Taking a look at this, I found the line-of-sight between the computer and the router took it through a couple of walls, the ceramic-filled kitchen cabinets and several major appliances. I was able to reposition the router to get a pretty good signal.

 

[RJM62]

Ding ding ding! Taking a look at this, I found the line-of-sight between the computer and the router took it through a couple of walls, the ceramic-filled kitchen cabinets and several major appliances. I was able to reposition the router to get a pretty good signal.

Glad it worked out for ya, at no additional cost even.

Sometimes the answer can be found by looking for the simple things.

-Rich

 

[rpadula]

Glad it worked out for ya, at no additional cost even.

Sometimes the answer can be found by looking for the simple things.

-Rich

Yeah, this is what decades of cable TV have done to us -- no one remembers that the solution to reception issues is sometimes to "jiggle the antenna."

 

[gismo]

Yeah, this is what decades of cable TV have done to us -- no one remembers that the solution to reception issues is sometimes to "jiggle the antenna."

I doubt that hanging tinfoil on the router will help though.

 

[gismo]

Sometimes. But the driver has to be available. I had an old adapter that wouldn't do WPA at all in Windows, and there was no updated driver available from the manufacturer. But it worked just fine in Linux because someone had gone to the trouble of writing a driver.

That was back a few years ago when WiFi cards with "official" Linux drivers were hard to come by. To do the same thing for Windows when hundreds of supported adapters are available off the shelf would be kind of counterproductive.



Windows XP SP0 and SP1 had no native support for WPA at all. A patch was released in 2003 (and is still available, by the way) which provided that support to SP0 and SP1 computers without installing the service pack. Support for WPA was also included in SP2.

Support for WPA2 wasn't included in SP2, but was made available via a series of patches and hotfixes (which I suppose are also still available, considering that the much older ones are), and also was included on SP3.

-Rich

I might update to SP3 but at this point the computer is doing what I want and the SP2 upgrade was painfully slow (probably due to a 200 MHz uC and 64MB RAM).