[pete]

I'm going to set up a network in our four unit coop building. I have the connection in my apartment on the 4th floor and want to be able to share with the rest of the house. It's a four story building and I was able to get four bars down to about 2.5 Floor, after which the signal dropped to 3 and then 2 on the ground floor.
What are my options for extending the range?

My setup will look like this:

cable connection 2mbps
modem
wireless router
MAC, PC, PC, PC

What are extenders and how do they work? Do they work? Would another antenna be the way to go perhaps?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Pete

[aaanorton]

What kind/model wireless router?

[pete]

It's a netgear MR814

[aaanorton]

Run a long ethernet cable from it to another MR814 (or similar) and set the 2nd one to bridge, disable DHCP serving. Give it the same name (SSID) as the 1st but put it on a different channel. This will make both units one big happy LAN.

[jfinete]

Many 802.11g base stations, including Apple's Airport Extreme Base Stations, can act as wireless "repeater." This feature is called a Wireless Distribution System. Unfortunately, WDS is not a standard 802.11 feature, so base stations from different companies usually can't create a WDS network together.

Even if all your wireless base stations are from the same company, WDS has a significant drawback: all the base stations must be set to the same frequency channel. This prevents you from using channel-hopping to avoid interference. This can be a problem if your building has a lot of 2.4GHz cordless phones.

[zl9600]

couldn't you use a d-link wireless repeater for something like that, or does that cause the same issue that having different brands on the same network causes?

[kampl]

Can you just move the wireless router down a floor or two? Seems to be the easiest way to go about things based on what you are saying. Running coax down to the router would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than rigging up another wireless bridge for instance.

[ghporter]

Nobody really wants to run coax for a wireless device-the leakage through just about any coax available is very, very large. Coax that can handle the wireless networking frequency range is exceptionally expensive.

What aaanorton is suggesting is to build an extended service set, allowing the clients to roam from one coverage area to another. This is actually not just a good idea, it's the strongest proposal for dealing with the given situation.

In this sort of situation, there's really no problem with mixing brands of equipment, but the MR814 is so affordable you'd be spending a lot more money to go with anything else.

By the way, the make/style/model/OS of the client computers doesn't make any difference at all, as long as they have compliant client cards. Those cards may have better or worse signal capabilities, but the platform really doesn't matter.

[kampl]

Originally posted by GHPorter:
Nobody really wants to run coax for a wireless device-the leakage through just about any coax available is very, very large. Coax that can handle the wireless networking frequency range is exceptionally expensive.

OK, I mis-typed. What I meant to suggest is moving the router down a floor for more even signal distribution. Running CAT-5 maybe 8 meters or soo (depending on how it's run) is a lot more economical than buying another wireless device to extend the range of the network.

I live in a 3 floor building in the middle unit. I have no problems utilizing the full bandwidth of my 1.5Mbps DSL line from the other units when necessary. I would imagine that moving the router down a floor would make for enough signal strength so that all floors would be able to use the 2Mbps the ISP is providing. If this is not the case or an option, using a better omnidirectional antenna on the access point would take care of the problem also. Full signal strength is not exactly a requirement to utilize the full 2Mbps the ISP is offering.

[ghporter]

Originally posted by kampl:
OK, I mis-typed. What I meant to suggest is moving the router down a floor for more even signal distribution. Running CAT-5 maybe 8 meters or soo (depending on how it's run) is a lot more economical than buying another wireless device to extend the range of the network.

Whew! I didn't think you really meant remoting antennas!

Anyway, moving an access point 10 meters or so to even out coverage is not a bad idea if you can find a satisfactory location that has power-I think that's the catch for most situations like this. Putting in a $35 wireless router configured as a roaming access point is a very good alternative, and can enhance coverage throughout the building.

It really all depends on what real estate agents live by: location, location, location. If he doesn't need the wired part of his router, all it takes is a few meters of Cat5 and the right spot. If he needs the wired router, that's more complicated.