Re: How to boost our Linksys WRT150N's signal -- across the house?

On Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:48:52 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:34:51 -0800, dgates <dgates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

12:30AM. My appologies if my brain is not quite functional.

Currently, we have two DSL lines:

EAST SIDE OF HOUSE: in an add-on "office" room separated by thick
walls).

Thick walls are bad for RF.

This DSL line leads to a Linksys WRT150N router, which is
connected one computer and three TiVos.

WEST SIDE OF HOUSE: in the living room. This DSL line leads to a
Linksys WRT300N router, which is connected to one laptop, and one
color printer.

We are about to get rid of Line #2, the DSL line in the living room,
leaving only the DSL line in the office, and we would like all devices
to be connected to that one router. However, the wireless signal gets
very weak as it travels through the thick walls of the add-on room and
across the house.

Yep. This is not a good use for wireless. Some other method of
connecting the two routers will be necessary.

Can we increase that signal -- either by boosting it at the source, or
by adding something like a "repeater" somewhere in the middle of the
house?

Nope.
1. It probably won't go thorugh the thick wall any better.

I may have overstated the "thick walls." The primary thick wall is
the one (well, two) separating the add-on office from the rest of the
house.

This morning, I walked around the house, checking how well the signal
strength from the east side of the house (the add-on office) carried
to the other rooms. I measured off the numbers reported by the TiVos,
and by the laptop as I moved it to the two rooms it tends to visit.

Here are the results (and what device reported each result).

East (office):
"94% (excellent)" from a TiVo.

Middle (family & dining room):
"64% (good)" from a TiVo
"2 out of 5 bars" from a laptop

West (living room):
"2 out of 5 bars" from a laptop

South (exercise room):
"41% (marginal)" from a TiVo


1. (cont'd) Increasing
the power at one end of the link doesn't magically do the same for the
other end. You would need two of these repeaters (one at each router)
in order for it to work.

Maybe I misunderstood how a booster would work. I assume that it's
analogous to one guy yelling to another guy. If you boost the volume
of the yelling guy's voice, you don't need to also boost the other
guy's hearing. No?


2. MIMO (802.11n) doesn't like repeaters. That's another reason why
the antennas are non-removeable. MIMO requires separate paths between
the antennas with slightly different delays. Unfortunately this only
increases the speed, not the range. As soon as you have a marginal
signal quality, the wireless access point will revert to 802.11g
speeds ( <54mbits/sec).

Interesting, now that you mention "marginal" and "G" in the same
sentence. I believe that the TiVo's wireless antenna is only a "G" in
the first place.


If the signal quality really sucks, then it
can easily go down to 802.11b speeds, and finally hit bottom at
1Mbit/sec.
3. Store and forward repeaters reduce the maximum speed by half for
each hop. Actually, it's usually worse than half. I don't think
you'll like that.

Years ago, we had some kind of "booster" device that connected
directly to our old router. The old router had removable antennae,
and this booster device sat right on top of it, connected to the
router by two wires. The booster looked almost exactly like the
router -- blue, and about the same size. It had its own antennae.

Those are still around. As previously mentioned, you'll need one at
each end. Even so, I don't think it will work through the thick wall.

I notice that the antennae don't come off of our current WRT150N, so
that might hurt the "booster" idea.

Yep. MIMO (802.11n) routers usually do that.

Another solution...? We're about to have a spare WRT300N just sitting
around. Perhaps we could park that somewhere in the middle of the
house and it could pass the signal along...?

Sure, lots of alternatives. Have your credit card handy.

I'm about to reply to John Navas's reply, in which he recommends
powerline networking. I gather that would cost a little bit.


However, I've heard comments like "Adding a repeater splits the signal
in half."

It reduces the MAXIMUM speed in half (or less). For example, if you
manage to squeeze a 12Mbit/sec wireless direct connection through your
thick wall, you'll get a theoretical maximum thruput (50% reduction
due to protocol overhead). Add a repeater in the middle, and you cut
that in half again for a maximum thruput of 3Mbits/sec. As I
mentioned, that's under ideal conditions and is usually somewhat less.

Hmm. I'm not good at doing these conversions. The last I checked,
our DSL speed was 384k-1.5M/128k-256k, and DSLReports.com just told me
I was doing 1,271 up and 314 down.

Our DSL speed is probably an important factor for most of the
transfering we'll be doing (something from the internet to a computer
or a TiVo). I'm pretty sure that TiVo-to-TiVo transfers will be less
than 5% of our usage.

I mention all this in case it affects your thinking in terms of the
numbers.


The number one use for our bandwidth, by a longshot, will be from the
computer in the office, the one about six feet from the WRT150N. The
only other devices that might even come close would be the TiVos --
say, if we watch YouTube videos, or decide to watch a Netflix movie on
demand.

That's a fairly typical mix. Netflix is a big bandwidth user.

I hope I've provided enough information for someone to help us with
our choice. Do we already have all the devices we need, or do we need
to buy some additional "booster" or "repeater?"

Yeah, fairly good description. The distance between the two routers
would have been useful.

I should mention that there's no particular reason the WRT300N router
has to stay on the far west side of the house once we disconnect the
DSL line over there. In fact, I was thinking it should go somewhere
in the middle of the house, somewhere that it can wirelessly receive
the signal from the other router, and be located centrally enough to
transmit it around to the other devices.

Rough estimate of distances...

East: DSL Modem. Signal starts here.

Go through 2 thick walls (or through a door and around a couple
corners).

Middle: 25 feet away in a straight line (through thick walls). Or
about 40 feet, through the door and around corners.

West: About 20 feet further than Middle.

South: 25 to 30 feet away from Middle. It may also get a more direct
signal from the first router shooting out one window, around a single
corner and in another window. So, rather than traveling about 60 or
70 feet through thick walls, the signal might have a shorter path
going out the window and about 40 feet.


25' or 40'

West -- 20' -- Middle --| |-- East
| | |
| ----
25'
|
|
South


I hope that conveys it.


Some suggestions:

1. Run CAT5 ethernet cable between the two routers. This is the best
and fastest alternative.

This might be a good idea, although I'm not sure what you mean by
"fastest." It would surely take longer to go under the house (or pay
someone to go under the house) and run CAT5 ethernet cable than to
just stick the WRT300N router in the middle of the house and let it
receive the signal wirelessly.

Or, by "fastest," do you mean the solution that would provide the
fastest transfer speeds once we get it wired up?


The WRT150N goes to the DSL modem and gets
to play router. The WRT300N acts as an ethernet switch, wireless
access point, and has the router section disabled. Note that any
wireless router can be uses as an access point:
<http://wireless.navas.us/wiki/Wi-Fi_How_To#Use_a_wireless_router_as_a_wireless_access_point>

Bookmarked. Thank you. Does that only work if the second wireless
router gets its signal from a cable, rather than wirelessly?


Having a wireless connection at each end of the house might be handy
if you have laptops and PDA's with wireless. Also, put the two
wireless routers on different non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11) so
that they don't interefere with each other.

I'll have to read up on setting channels, but I suspect it'll be easy
enough.

(Having just looked at the Linksys admin screens under "Wireless >
Basic Wireless Settings," I see that I'll have to set Radio Band to
either Standard or Wide, rather than Auto, then manually set the
Standard and/or Wide Channels.)


2. If you have any other runs of wire between routers (i.e. phone
wire, 25 pair bundle, alarm wire, CATV coax, zip cord, junk wire,
barbed wire, etc), you can run ethernet over the 4 wires. Various
common technologies are:
- HomePNA phone line networking
- HomePlug power line networking
- 10Base2 ethernet over coax cable
- 10baseT ethernet over CAT5 or whatever else you can scrounge.
Just about any kind of wire can be bludgeoned into carrying ethernet.
There's also fiber optic cable and media converters, which will work
if you have access to a source of cheap fiber.

I don't wanna explain how all of these work and are used. If one or
more looks interesting, post a reply and I'll fill in the blanks.

I probably need just a little more convincing that there isn't a
wireless way to do this, perhaps as easily as moving the second router
to the middle of the house.

If a wired run is truly the best way to do it, then I'm still favoring
the method that doesn't involve someone going under the house.
Powerline networking sounds good...

And I guess, with that cue, I should continue these thoughts in a
reply to John Navas's Powerline-themed message.


I hope I haven't talked your ear off. And perhaps you can help me
with the final decision:

Can I meet all my needs with no new cabling and no new devices, simply
by putting the WRT300N router in the middle of the house? Or will I
suffer over the longterm enough that it's worth spending some money
(perhaps to have a professional run an ethernet cable from the east to
west side of our house)?
.

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