Issue covering whole house with WiFi

I will link a full-sized image I made first, to help me explain my issue



Basically, I like to use my laptop in my room, on a proper desk and all or on my bed when watching movies (yellow box is lappy on desk).
When we first got the router, and for ~2 years the router sat on the shelf above my desk (red dot in my room). This was good since my laptop and my brother's desktop got good signal. However, the signal going to the living room was really weak, 1-2 bars at most, dropping alot, and really slow. I think this is due to all the walls that come between my room and the living room.

Anyway, since both my parents like to use their laptops in the comfort of the living room, and that's also where my brother's (new ) PS3 is, they had me move the router to the living room. (red dot in living room)
Bear in mind these are the best locations in each room due to proximity of power plugs.

Now the problem is that I get basically no signal in my room , and I need to use my laptop on the dining table.

Now after some contemplation of the issue, I have thought of two possibilities.
1) Get an extension cord and move the router to my dressing table in my room (green dot).
2) get a long phone cable and move the router to the location in the kitchen (green dot there)

I would like to know what you guys think about the change in signals in both cases. I think I can find an extension, so I will try option 1 and see, but I think the kitchen will give a better connection to both rooms since it is in a central location, and signals go out in all directions (duh )

I tried modding my router, to increase the power it puts out and boost the signal, which I think would overcome the problem but tomato doesn't support my router.
Does anyone know of any others?
My router is a Linksys WAG200G home gateway.

Hope someone can help

Thanks, and sorry for the long post

 

no way to tell from a map. you need to take into account what the building/walls/floors are made of, any sources of interference within say 100 feet, etc, etc.

interference includes cordless phones, microwave ovens, bluetooth devices, wireless power and water meters, etc, etc. also take into account any of those devices your neighbors have/use.

place your wireless access points where you think they might work, then be prepared to move them around to get best coverage.

or you can use something like inssider and the wireless card in your laptop to do a quickie site survey. just walk around the house and look for other wireless machines (neighbors again), signal strengths, and what channels are in use. keep note of dead spots and overused channels. set up YOUR wireless access points on unused channels and place them in locations of minimal interference.

even with a survey, you are probably going to have to move things around once or twice.

 

Your WAG200G is just fine in terms of signal strenght.Looking at the diagaram in both "red" locations half the signal is going out of the house.I think the green spot in the kitchen should cover the whole house asuming we are talking about a regular house with typical plaster walls..

 

If you bought a Wireless N router, that would fix the problem. I recently setup a Netgear Wireless N(this one: NETGEAR - Factory-Refurbished RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router w/ 4-Port Ethernet Switch - WNR3500-100NAR) for my dad at his office building, and I can I can get a signal from 150 feet away through offices. I even get a 2 bar signal 200 feet away.

 

assuming no interference on the 2.4 and 5.8 gz bands. In a residential neighborhood, that's a horrible assumption.

 

Often people don't take into account the wifi cards in their notebooks.I changed the crappy Atheros card in my notebook withan Intel Centrino 6200 and the diference was amazing.

 

Move the router to the kitchen of your brothers room (whichever works best or easiest), you should be fine.

 

DD-WRT will let you boost the transmission power.

My house is set up a lot like yours, and we have the router on one end of the house or the other. The kitchen end didn't work, cause we all live in the back of the house, so we moved it back there, then we had no wifi in the kitchen. Then i dropped DD-WRT onto the router, and increased the power about 50mw, and it covers the whole house just fine now. Also works in the driveway

Looks like you're loosing a ton of power with that entranceway too. It lets the signal get out, but then bounces off the wall and goes into the street i bet. Brick i assume?

 

Thanks for all the quick replies peeps

First up, I will check the possible areas where I can have the router using Inssider, and re-post the results

Also, I don't really want to buy a new router, since as thundernet said, this one is able to cover the whole house

I checked DD-WRT but it is also doesn't support my router, also can't do anything about the entrance to the building, its the same kinda wall as the rest of ours, cement/plaster I think.

Also, my laptop has an Intel 5100 wifi chip, I think that should be ok

 

So I did a quick survey as newsposter suggested, and will post the results of inSSIDer with each part of my post

1) Living room : The usual devices, TV, dish, DVD, ps2, ps3, ~2 laptops. Also there are 2 wireless phones centimeters from the router. Guess that means a lot of interference
This is also where I found the greatest number of wireless networks


2) The Kitchen: Usual devices here too, Dishwasher, micorwave, blender, etc.
Also, fewer networks


3) My room: No interfering devices, just a wired phone.
Also, fewest networks, but problem here is that half the signal goes out.



Next up, I will try to dig up some extensions, and longer phone cables and see how the signal is in the 2 place I thought of
3) My room

 

I tried the kitchen guys, as I said I would, and it was good, with signals throughout the house. However, turns out the router adapter is only 220V while the on suitable plug in the kitchen it 110V, and appliances use this plug so we can't have it changed

Instead I decided to try a plug in the corridor that is 220V
This was also good and the whole house was covered, with speedtest in my bedroom and the living room providing full speed.
I also took some screens with inSSIDer, so can you guys look over them and tell me if this will be ok?
I will be mounting the router onto the wall.

My network is called SaudiNet

My room


Living room


All my nieghbour's networks are caught no matter where in the house I go, also someone mentioned using an unpopulated channel. All other networks except for 1 are on channel 6 or 11, and only one uses 2

Should I set it to 2?
Also, how is this done?

Thanks

PS - an image showing the new place of the router (hopefully)
Blue dot

 

Why don't you do wired? Yea I realize that you need awful long chords, but they may work better for you.

 

Move your routers from channels 2, 6, and 11. These are the world-wide defaults. Let the rest of the world compete for the use of those channels, There are a total of 13 to choose from. Set your routers to use different channels, and channels that are NOT being used by other nearby machines.

 

Wired isn't suitable since most of the computers are laptops and we move them around a lot.

Newsposter, from the screens would you say this location is good/ ideal given the speeds attained?

Also which channel would you recommend, since as the images show, most users are on 6 and 11.

Thanks for all your help

 

Whatever works, seems like it's doing what you want. That was the point right?

DD-WRT can only boost so much.
Many, many routers are actually under powered. While you may get a boost in power while idle or under light load, under heavier load you may see dips in signal strength. Also, going to far you can decrease not only your signal stability, but also you see diminishing returns and may even cause your router to destabilize or worse, blow out capacitors early.

Low power is one of the bigger killers of electronics (more so than over voltage jolts). Capacitors are especially hurt by low power conditions. More than a few routers (Netgear in particular) have fallen to this fate.

If you are seeing an increase, great, but watch it during high use, and make sure you having, passed the point where you are just trying to put out more than it can handle.

50mw doesn't seem like much more than stock, but there is a reason they put it where it was from the factory. I have seen some that were fine up to 75, but beyond that, you could crank it all the way to 250 and not see any change. Also, at 75 under heavy load my signal would run from 300mb (light transfer) to 2mb under heavy. Pulling it back down to 36 ended up being the most it could realistically handle under heavy transfers. Most routers cannot go above 27 without severe degradation under heavy transfer.

When I was stable at 36, I was using a computer power supply as the power supply to give the router unlimited amperage. With the normal power brick, it could only handle 26mw before I saw fluctuations.

I have even seen some routers that fluctuated heavily on default settings.

This doesn't even get into the fact that DD-WRT is overkill, over complicated and known to slow down many home routers. It's great for certain jobs, but a newer router will often better serve you with default firmware unless you have a specific feature unavailable, such as a repeater. This is especially true with new high end routers such as the Netgear WNDR3700 or Linksys e3000.

Some houses make this difficult.

I wire when I can, but let's be honest, most people aren't into wiring their house.

Actually, that is untrue and a widely held misconception.
If you look on this picture:

You can see that Channel 11 bleeds over onto everything from 9 to 13.

If the channels were more narrow band, yes, you would have more channels, but realistically, while there are more, there is really only 3 usable ones without bleed over, which is why those 3 are picked as defaults. Also, while the idea is to find one that has no one else on it, that isn't always practical, at which point you try and find a channel where you have a strong signal for your own, while others are weak. The more difference in strength allows your system to more easily filter your signal. Sometimes overlapping other channels by using say channel 8, will help, but other times it just means you are catching overlapping traffic from 6 and 11.

If you really want a different channel, going to Wireless N on 5ghz can help, but this has a shorter range (despite manufacturer claims, given equal antenna, the higher the frequency, the shorter the range, this is fact. Don't let them fool you).

 

yawn. the peaks are on channels 2, 6, & 11.

pick nits elsewhere.

 

Thanks for the awesome reply leslieann

I actually learned alot of new stuff.

Also since the channels bleed, should I just leave at 11 and call it a day, or should I move it over to 2 since that is the least populated

Just one more question:
If I get another adapter (generic) is there a chance it could damage the router?
I will make sure to check that both give the same output Voltage and amps
The reason is that the current linksys one is onle 220V , and it would be easier to get a 110v adapter than to change the socket

 

Before you swallow anyones 'myths' about WiFi, you should read some of the channel interference white papers available at Cisco, Atheros, and Broadcom.

 

You want to use channel 1, not 2. Channel 2 overlaps with all the networks running on channel 6. With channel 1, you're only competing with the mmm37 network.

 

How about 2 PLC plugs that connect a router on each end of the house?

 

Based on this picture:


I would be looking at trying channel 6 actually (with 1 an alternate if it doesn't work out). While there is more traffic on 6, your signal is much stronger than the others on that channel.

Think of it like this, with channel 6, you are yelling compared to a few people whispering in the background. On channel 1, you are competing with only one person, but they are yelling at almost the same volume. Which is your problem on 11. On 11 you have several whisperers, but also someone at nearly the same volume, this isn't so good.

 

Mere mortals typically prefer the short version.

When Wireless LANs Collide: How To Beat The Wireless Crowd - SmallNetBuilder

 

Thanks for the links and info on channels, I'll look into it

This is interesting
How exactly would this work, and what is a PLC plug?

 

It allows you to run ethernet over the power wires in your home. It's not really all that cheap in my opinion). Besides, you don't need two routers, it just adds more problems. You already have enough routers in your area and you already have one working just fine.

If you want to consider this, why not just upgrade to a nice, newer dual radio N. This would increase your coverage, give you N speeds, as well as run on the higher frequency of channels not yet used by most others (though this only helps on systems capable of taking advantage of it).

The other alternative is a higher gain antenna, or even using a wireless relay rather than power over ethernet. Done right, you can cover a large amount of area for pretty cheap, but again, you already have what you need, so why add complexity.

 

Just wanted to jump in and thank you guys for this thread. I had always dumped mine on channel 11, thinking that no one really used it. After downloading inSSIDer, I realized it was the busiest channel on the 2.4ghz spectrum in my neighborhood! I've now moved mine down a bit. I'll have to test to see if this was the issue with my PS3 dropping off of the network at times.

Good app, and good info here.

 

Mere Mortals need to make sure they are getting complete information, not summaries that leave out information for the sake of making a cute, short article.

 

You're funny.