WiFi Booster/ Extender

[John]

Seen in Aldi today - a double 13amp socket with charger USB and WiFi Extender. Could be useful.

[Andy Burns]

Fitting in a metal back-box at ankle-height doesn't sound ideal for signal levels

[John]

Andy Burns [e-mail] wrote in news:gvjebhFd0c2U1 @mid.individual.net:

My usual laptop use is about 2 metres from a socket.

[Martin Brown]

They work OK for projecting the signal into the room. More so if you have one that accepts a wired internet feed and broadcasts that.

Simple minded plug and play Wifi extenders use up to half the available bandwidth communicating with the base station.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Martin Brown expressed precisely :

An old / spare router modem is much more useful, wired to a the main router and usualy free.

[whisky-dave]

Part of the problem would be having to have it wired, as that would mostly negate it's usefulness.

[Brian Gaff]

So this is over the wiring is it? Or is it just a booster by receiving on one channel and transmitting on another. I thought these days the way to go was the mesh protocol. I'll spare you my rant on putting data on the mains to interfere with radio signals this time. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

We all used to wire everything, nothing wrong with wire. Brian

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

whisky-dave brought next idea :

I think some can be used wirelessly, they just need power..

[Martin Brown]

Depends what you are trying to do. I wanted to have a new Wifi network covering the parts of the house that the base station was weak in and so did it by sharing and stealing some of the wired bandwidth for the TV.

Most Wifi extenders come configured to be almost plug and play network rebroadcasters on the same channel(s) just needing a password and with a simple web interface to set them up. Configuring a router to do this is often possible but involves a lot of reconfiguration.

Ethernet over mains is OK if you only have a small number of remote nodes that can be wired. It annoys RSGB members a bit.

[Chris Green]

I played around a bit with it but found (in our house anyway) that it rarely did any better than a WiFi connection. As soon as I tried it over a distance where WiFi was getting flakey the 'over mains' connection was just as bad.

My wired ethernet 'through the trees' to the garage is much the best! :-)

[mm0fmf]

It's never Ok and is really a massive source of electrical shitnes. Do proper wireless bridging or install ethernet but don't use mains wiring for this.

[T i m]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:36:53 +0100, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: <snip>

Depending on the router.

I had an old Belkin cable router running as an AP for a few years that failed the other day. I dug out an equally old but unused Edimax cable router (given to me by a mate) and used that to replace the Belkin.

Upon access to the WEB GUI (via Wifi) I was offered a 'Setup Wizard' and one of the option templates was 'AP Mode'. I selected that, set the SSID and Passphrase to the same as the old one, connected the LAN cables back up (them acting as a switch) and away it went (my Mobile phone reconnected on it's own). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[whisky-dave]

would be interesting to see how peole use telephone if they all had to be wired. It would make walking down the street even more dangerous than it is.

[whisky-dave]

I thought the idea was to have wireless exdended.

I know I set one up for my brother. I used to have an intercom that worked the same, in that it uses the mains cable on the ring main, so there was NO need for an aditional cable.

I don;t think that is possible with the BT router my brother had.

[whisky-dave]

and if you secure it well enough you can use it as a zip wire ;-) hours of fun, well perhaps minutes of fun.