WIFI range extender ????

I have a BT Home Hub providing my ADSL & radiating / receiving wifi. However I have a distributed site with several buildings well out of range of the BT Home hub, all of which are linked by CAT5. So far I have suffered using various wireless hubs cat5 connected, but it is a pain having different ssid's etc and none are particularly reliable, needing occasional rebooting.

Is there a 'range extender' that will sit on the cat5 network and re-radiate/receive the BT Hub transparently in each of the buildings. I don't really want a boosted full site wifi set up for security reasons.

(Although extensive this is essentially a home set up not a business, so the budget is limited.)

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson
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That is what your collection of ethernet connected wireless hubs already do. You can get "range extenders" that takes the existing WiFi signal and re-radiates it. These boxes don't need an ethernet connection but do need to be in range of the "host" WiFi box. They also halve the the through put at the same time. You'll still see a 54Mbps link or WHY but if you actually try to use 54Mbps you won't be able to.

Have your tried setting all your APs to the same SSID, channel and security (type and password)? I have a sneaky feeling that it can all just sort itself out, certainly at places I visit a "site survey" shows many AP's all with the same SSID, channel and security just different signal levels. The WiFi in such places works... To avoid too much in the way of RF collsions try to reduce the places where you can see signals or roughly the same strength from differnt APs.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Second thought(s) are these "wireless hubs" really a wireless router with WAN and LAN ports or a plain wireless Access Point (LAN port(s) only)? Is the ethernet cable plugged into a WAN or LAN port? If a WAN port is the box configured into bridge mode? Where do devices connected to the wireless side getting their IP address etc from the DHCP server in the AP or from the BT Hub? Don't guess look at the DHCP tables in the AP(s) and BT Hub.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Often its from the machine to the other end that has the issues, from bitter experience, each time you add a boosting system it will probably just clutter up the band more and cause interference or suffer from it as there are now so many networks using the same channels.

Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

That won't work IMO

You need wireless bridges really.

Reply to
mrc

Hi,

There a a few options, including

1) WIFI range extender (repeater) - acts as a client and an AP

2) Stick an AP on the ethernet in bridging mode. If the ethernet is logically the same network as the WIFI from the BT Home Hub, this should work - set up with the same ESSID.

You may be interested in this -

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have one - very featureful piece of kit and supports several modes of operating including the ones above. You'd pretty much hedge your bets with that and it's not hugely expensive.

Reply to
Tim Watts

They are US Robotics 8054 'Wireless Turbo Access Point & Router' with the DHCP facility not enabled. DHCP is provided by the BT Home Hub.

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

I recently changed to BT fibre and have the old wireless router - which isn't that old. Could I feed that off the BT one to act as a range extender - situated in a different part of the house? I have CAT5 going to the attic room and having a second transmitter up there would probably give much better coverage - the BT one is situated next to where the line comes into the house.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

I think there is something in this, you keep the same SSID but have to encourage the end client to hand over from one access point to another as the signal strength varies. Perhaps that means same SSID bit different channels, I don't know. Perhaps it also means that you need to have all your access points from the same manufacturer and have them support the handing off of the client from one to the other but that doesn't really fit in with the idea of a use-what-I've-got budget solution.

Might be an idea for the o/p to experiment with setting SSID to same, encryption same but channels different and see if the setup will hand over.

Reply to
fred

I don't know if that one will let you do it but some Wifi access points can be configured as repeater stations with the same SSID as the base station. My 3Com will do this quite easily.

You can also get a high gain antenna that will support a link across

300m or more and a few brick walls if you have one detatchable antenna.

Range extender on Dabs will get you a few dedicated units.

Is the aim to eliminate the Cat5 cables from building to building or to have the same network SSID everywhere?

Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

The later - so devices can move around without issue hopefully. The CAT5 is in and working fine

AWEM

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

My ancient iPAQ has a setting about hand off but I've not seen it in more recent WiFi enabled kit. So I suspect it's in the protocol but "just works". The iPAQ only does 802.11b IIRC...

I think it's worth a try with same everything and see what happens. If there are problems try changing the channels used (and fixing them) bearing in mind that only 1, 6 and 11 don't over lap.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Thats what I did with my old router. Just disable DHCP in the old router and plug it into one of the LAN ports and it should go. If you set the SSID and pass phrase to the same as the new one and put it on a different channel the computers should be able to select the best one dynamically.

Reply to
dennis

For certain values of dynamically...

If you open up a laptop and connect to the strongest access point signal, then its fine. What it does not do is actually allow roaming. i.e. move that same machine from close to one access point to the other, and it will still try to talk to the original connection point even when there is another that offers a much better signal strength. Only when you explicitly break the connection (or it goes out of range) will windows look for an alternative. You then have a secondary problem that the router injecting internet connectivity into the APs won't have any way of being told that the connection point has changed - hence it will still be using the MAC address of the previous point. This normally resolves in a minute or so when it works out its not getting responses, and does an ARP broadcast to find the client again - but seamless is it not!

Reply to
John Rumm

You can get repeater / range extender APs designed to provide WiFi over wider areas. However the posh solution are meshing devices. These automatically establish multipoint communications between each other, learn about their relative signal conditions and select the best route automatically.

Reply to
John Rumm

My iPAQ (Windows Mobile 5) has a WiFi roaming setting of "Poor Signal" or "No Signal" it does not say what constitues a "Poor Signal". This is not a setting I have seen in more recent devices.

Hum, my routers ARP table shows the MAC address of the end point not the MAC address of the intermediate wireless AP (in bridge mode). How long the unmanaged switch between the router and AP takes to notice the move is another matter but I've never experienced any noticable delay when physically moving things on switch ports.

If I had another AP I'd play...

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Those are quite funky - I loaded a meshing enabled OpenWRT firmware (it was ready loaded with the right stuff just for laziness, otheriwse not particularly special) onto about 10 Linksys WRT54GS's once and set them on batteries around a large field with one end near the office WIFI and the far ends well out of range.

Worked really well.

Reply to
Tim Watts

In article , Andrew Mawson scribeth thus

From what I've seen of it you can do this using the same SSID around the area but it will cost more than not a lot.

Give

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a call and see what they have on offer. Wireless repeaters, thats to say receive and re transmit the signal aren't that much cop. And a lot will depend on what the 2.4 Ghz usage is like where your based..

Reply to
tony sayer

Firstly "windows mobile" != "windows" - so behaviour will be different.

Roaming is something very difficult to do well - having said that its not something you often actually need when it comes down to it.

The trend has been to make windows less hop happy rather than more. While it would be nice if it could roam, its actually even more annoying when it decides to jump to another network that momentarily has a stronger signal (especially when that network for example lacks internet access or access to your LAN etc). So the current behaviour makes some sense.

It depends somewhat on at what layer your AP is working. If it truly is operating in bridge mode (i.e. layer 2 routing based on MAC addresses rather than layer 3 IP routing), the non roaming endpoint of a connection should have the MAC of the actual laptop cached in its ARP table. If its working as an IP level router, then the routers MAC address will be cached.

Most switches will spot the change fairly quickly IME.

Reply to
John Rumm

Yup it does work nicely... no need to tit about with spanning tree settings either.

With things like the WRT54Gs you will get a so called "lite mesh" since they only have one radio. So the same radio has to switch between servicing local AP clients and the backhaul mesh connection. The implication being that the more hops you have to go through, the lower the maximum data throughput. (although even 4 hops will still give you a respectable 4Mps IIRC). The posher kit with two radios does not have that limitation obviously.

Reply to
John Rumm

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