WiFi coverage options for a house

[Mr. Pedantic]

I'm renting a two-storey house which I want to cover with WiFi. The problem is the first-floor ceiling seems to be made of concrete or something that blocks WiFi signal. The signal is great on the same floor as the router, but as soon as I climb the stairs the signal decreases to almost nothing. It's just the floor/ceiling that does this, the other walls all seem to have no effect on the signal.

There are phone ports on both floors. I have a router/modem on the top floor because my PC is there connected via ethernet, and the only thing I can think of is to run an ethernet cable from the router on one level to a repeater on the other level.

I can't change the internal wiring, drilling holes in the floor is obviously out. What can I do/buy/use to get coverage on both levels?

 

[KingFatty]

How many floors, and which floor is the wireless router located? I'm guessing it's 3 floors, and the router is on the 3rd floor? Any way you can put it on a lower floor?

 

[nsafreak]

The easiest way would be to pick up a decent ethernet over power line adapter kit like this one then plug in a wireless access point into it. The other end would of course be plugged into one of the ethernet ports of your wireless router.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

How many floors, and which floor is the wireless router located? I'm guessing it's 3 floors, and the router is on the 3rd floor? Any way you can put it on a lower floor?

2 floors. Doesn't matter which, there'll always be one with great coverage and one with shit coverage.

The easiest way would be to pick up a decent ethernet over power line adapter kit like this one then plug in a wireless access point into it. The other end would of course be plugged into one of the ethernet ports of your wireless router.

That seems like a good idea.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

The easiest way would be to pick up a decent ethernet over power line adapter kit like this one then plug in a wireless access point into it. The other end would of course be plugged into one of the ethernet ports of your wireless router.

You could even get a powerline adapter with built-in wifi, and skip the additional access point. There are drawbacks to these powerline adapters, of course, such as max 100Mbit x 5 (unless you spend more [no wifi]) and max Wireless N300, but if you are OK with those speeds they are great (I have a Netgear myself).

EDIT: This adapter does Gigabit and Wireless b/g/n/ac, but I cannot find the maximum ac throughput. (and says it won't be released until March...)

 

[slag]

The easiest way would be to pick up a decent ethernet over power line adapter kit like this one then plug in a wireless access point into it. The other end would of course be plugged into one of the ethernet ports of your wireless router.

Oddly enough, I was just reading the reviews on this unit this morning for a project I have and it looks horrible which sucks because the price is right. An in depth test showed it only passed 32 Mbps from point to point which is crap. It only has 10/100 ports, so how could it do "Up to 500 Mbps over existing electrical lines".

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Oddly enough, I was just reading the reviews on this unit this morning for a project I have and it looks horrible which sucks because the price is right. An in depth test showed it only passed 32 Mbps from point to point which is crap. It only has 10/100 ports, so how could it do "Up to 500 Mbps over existing electrical lines".

Use up to 8 adapters to network devices in different rooms without running new cabling.

For that model, adding up to 8 adapters will get you a maximum of 500Mpbs concurrently. It is misleading, and all mfrs do it, which is why I pointed out some of the shortcomings earlier. I just ran a quick test on mine between a wired PC (cat6) and this PC with powerline adapter and averaged ~60Mbps. It's not great, but it is faster and more reliable vs Wireless ac1300 in this home built in 1904.

TP-Link is probably better than Trendnet and Netgear though, as the TP-Link AV500 shows ~80Mbps in testing here. I bought the Netgear adapter at Best Buy only because I didn't want to wait for shipping from Amazon and BB didn't sell the TP-Link in store.

 

[slag]

For that model, adding up to 8 adapters will get you a maximum of 500Mpbs concurrently. It is misleading, and all mfrs do it, which is why I pointed out some of the shortcomings earlier. I just ran a quick test on mine between a wired PC (cat6) and this PC with powerline adapter and averaged ~60Mbps. It's not great, but it is faster and more reliable vs Wireless ac1300 in this home built in 1904.

TP-Link is probably better than Trendnet and Netgear though, as the TP-Link AV500 shows ~80Mbps in testing here. I bought the Netgear adapter at Best Buy only because I didn't want to wait for shipping from Amazon and BB didn't sell the TP-Link in store.

It is very misleading because unless you get 8 adapters in that kit that advertises up to 500 Mbps, you won't get it.

 

[slag]

Update: got the items in, set them up in a matter of a minute, and it made a huge difference. No more buffering AT ALL in sling TV, super fast netflix and amazon video as well. I should have done this half a year ago. In short, it does work and I'll be purchasing more in the very near future.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Update: got the items in, set them up in a matter of a minute, and it made a huge difference. No more buffering AT ALL in sling TV, super fast netflix and amazon video as well. I should have done this half a year ago. In short, it does work and I'll be purchasing more in the very near future.

That's great! Which model did you get, and what speeds are you getting?

 

[slag]

Av500 as discussed above, no ideas on speed but it's better than the 802.11n speeds I was getting as it's smoother, doesn't buffer, and loads video faster