wifi setup at home

jamesleecoleman

Alright so we live in a townhouse. There's an upstairs, main floor and basement. We would like to be able to extend the signal about 50 ft outside of the townhouse and eliminate buffering. Any one got any suggestions for powerful wifi routers?

I've have had a bad experience with using a wifi extender. The main wifi router wouldn't list some of the devices that were connected to the wifi. There were times when the signal was lost. The wifi router was upstairs and I moved it downstairs and removed the extender for a better signal. Things did get better but once in a while a smart tv will start to buffer and we think it's because two other smart tvs are streaming.

I currently have a netgear r6220

Ertaz

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

Alright so we live in a townhouse. There's an upstairs, main floor and basement. We would like to be able to extend the signal about 50 ft outside of the townhouse and eliminate buffering. Any one got any suggestions for powerful wifi routers?

I've have had a bad experience with using a wifi extender. The main wifi router wouldn't list some of the devices that were connected to the wifi. There were times when the signal was lost. The wifi router was upstairs and I moved it downstairs and removed the extender for a better signal. Things did get better but once in a while a smart tv will start to buffer and we think it's because two other smart tvs are streaming.

I currently have a netgear r6220

It's time to ditch GOFWF. https://backchannel.com/a-gourmet-guide-to-wifi-b9a308e662a9#.4bxepsctg

TechGromit

I have one for each floor of my house and I have about half my house hard wired with Cat. 5 too.

jamesleecoleman

What is GOFWF????


@Ertaz: I forgot about mesh networking. I'll have to look into it more.

@TechGromit: I wish I could run Cat5 throughout the townhouse. It would be an awesome project but we would get in trouble if I did.

I'm thinking that I might have to hit the books for this one.

Chard26

Hi,

Take a look at power line adaptors, and use the current circuits of your house to provide a cabled infrastructure

You can even get ones that provide wifi if you dont want to use cabled ones.

Thanks
Chard

jamesleecoleman

I'll check that out Chard, thanks

Hammer80

For electrical to work your house better be recent and electrical work was actually done by a Master Electrician that followed building codes not some jack of all trades they pulled from the street for the day. I tried doing eletrical before and got mediocre results at best, way too much interference, speeds fluctuated a lot, and intermittently it stops working which then requires you to reset the electrical ethernet jack.

jamesleecoleman

I guess the electrical stuff is out. The town houses are atleast ten years old.

Ertaz

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

What is GOFWF????


@Ertaz: I forgot about mesh networking. I'll have to look into it more.

@TechGromit: I wish I could run Cat5 throughout the townhouse. It would be an awesome project but we would get in trouble if I did.

I'm thinking that I might have to hit the books for this one.

Good Old-Fashioned Wifi (GOFWF). The mesh networks have gotten some great reviews. https://on.google.com/hub/

*EDIT* Also consider any interference you may have. A high wattage microwave will absolutely kill a 2.4Ghz signal.

jamesleecoleman

Thanks for explanation.

I'll look at what we can do and into options. I also have to add a firewall to the network so the kid don't get into the ****.

TechGromit

Hammer80 wrote: »

For electrical to work your house better be recent and electrical work was actually done by a Master Electrician that followed building codes not some jack of all trades they pulled from the street for the day. I tried doing eletrical before and got mediocre results at best, way too much interference, speeds fluctuated a lot, and intermittently it stops working which then requires you to reset the electrical ethernet jack.

I actually have one of these in my house for a place I can't run Cat.5 wiring without cutting a lot of holes in walls/ceilings. and it works fine. It's worth trying out, they are cheap enough. You might not get a full 100 mb connection, but used I for Netflix streaming and it worked fine.

Hammer80

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

Thanks for explanation.

I'll look at what we can do and into options. I also have to add a firewall to the network so the kid don't get into the ****.

Save yourself the trouble and just setup OpenDNS on your home router and you will have the ability to both monitor and block ****. They have free account but if you want to see the full logs then you have to pay something like $20 a year but even the free account allows you to block **** and fine tune the filtering. The benefit is that this will filter on all connected devices including your kids smartphones if they are connected to wifi.