Wi -Fi options -Advice

Thu 1 Mar 2018, 15:55

I would think you should be able to scrounge an old wifi router hereabouts. I've used my obsolete spares to set up as only wireless transmitters in two different areas of the house where signal from the single main router attached to the telephone line was inadequate from range and blockage attenuation. The other functions - adsl phone connect etc. - were simply disabled in the device setup and only the wireless (and the 2 or 4 hardwired sockets used as wanted a wired connection to a device) were used as the connection details to the phone service were done by the "master" router.

In this case, the two repeaters made from the old wireless router/phone modems, were connected to the master via ethernet wires run to their position - running a single line around rooms, through door edges etc. is much easier than running 4 or 5 wires into each room!

You can also get wireless repeaters that don't need a wire to be able to the retransmit a wireless signal picked up from the base station, which will be amplified, and some probably enable wired connections from them as well on receipt of the radio uplink. I'm not familiar with the terminology used - bridge, wireless access point, repeater etc. but the internet was full of google/duckduck go! search results of how to use an old wifi router to make an extended wireless and wired network with redundant kit you can scrounge, to look at. Unfortunately I've used mine...

If re-purposing old routers the wireless and wired ethernet transmission standards should be noted: modern wireless standards are 802.11n and ac, older such a b or g are much lower transmission rates. If just using world wide web you should see "n" being a good enough bit rate, as the fibre/adsl modems speed are limited, but if moving files over the network it'll feel pretty slow for pc to pc, printer links etc.

All you need then are/is ethernet cable(s) to connect the two routers of the right length 100mbit or gigabit (cat5e or cat6 cables, cat 5 will do too much of the time). I don't know if old adsl routers can be used to take in a signal wirelessly, and then rebroadcast it, you can google that one, I just ran wires between the base and repeater routers made of re-used old adsl wireless modem routers.

If you can't scrounge a redundant wireless modem router, TP-Link is the easist if your earth wiring is all contiguous, but I've no experience of that, the individual units transmit speed compared to n or ac standard wireless, how may units you'd need etc. as never tried them.