How to Improve WiFi Signal Strength and Coverage
Often one WiFi access point isn’t enough to get sufficient coverage of your whole house, so what’s the best way to improve your WiFi network? Let me explain… WiFi is a mixed blessing, the convenience of wireless networking is great but sometimes dropouts and week signal ruins your experience. The most common way of overcoming this is with a range extender. These are small boxes of all shapes and sizes which connect to the main WiFi network and boost it out for better coverage, this diagram shows it nicely. But if you’ve ever owned one of these things, you’ll know how frustrating they can be. The speeds are often pretty bad as the repeater is mostly placed far away from the main WiFi network, meaning that the repeater has the slowest and least reliable connection to the network, it’s this bad signal which is then boosted out for everything else to get hold of The other disadvantage is the limitations of where the repeater can go. The repeater box has to be placed somewhere within the reach of the main WiFi network as otherwise it won’t get a connection. In turn, this could mean that multiple repeaters have to repeat each other in order to get complete coverage. So what’s my suggestion? Well, in the past I used two range extenders, one at each end of the house to get full coverage And, as I’ve just explained, it was awful. I now have a much better system in place. The whole thing is based on powerline, a way of getting wired networking through the existing wires in your house We've made a number of videos about powerline and if you want to watch them, they're in the cards for this video. There’s a powerline connecter at the main hub which is hooked up with cat5e networking cable, essential to saturate the maximum speed possible There’s then another powerline connecter upstairs, a cat5e cable comes out of that and into an old router, this is where things get a little confusing. The old router is set up to act like something called an “Access Point” or AP. You can buy specialist APs which are designed to work like this or just modify an old router. I used this video tutorial to set it up but essentially, you just need to turn off DCHP, set the SSID and password to the same as your existing WiFi network and set the router’s IP to something outside of the DCHP range of the main router. Go ahead and watch that video if you’re stuck! Once everything’s set up, the old router will be giving out WiFi signals under the same settings as the main WiFi network so devices on the network should switch seamlessly from one to another. If the one extra access point doesn’t provide enough coverage for the whole house, getting another powerline plug and another old router will do the job. And, even better, if you want to connect a wired internet device to the network, you can use any free LAN prots on the back of the old routers as connections to the network. The old router is acting as an access point and a switch. I hope you’ve understood what I’ve gone over in this video but if you haven’t, leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
https://youtu.be/mQ9oXjLI054