Wi-fi extension advice

WeegyAVLover

Hi,

I have an elderly neighbour who approached me for some advice regarding Wi-fi issues he has in his house.

He stays in an old Victorian house with solid walls. He has 2 electrical circuits in his house. His kitchen on a separate one and the rest on another.  He is losing his Wi-fi signal in the livingroom and wants the best solution to fix it. He said he has a budget of £50 he is willing to spend but cheaper would be preferred.

I thought about power plugs but with the separate ring that maybe an issue.

Then I was thinking wall plate Wi-fi extender but then thought if the Wi-fi signal is not reaching the livingroom then these might not be an option either.

Just looking for some advice on the best solution for the old timer )

mickevh

For that kind of budget, your options are pretty limited.

The best solution is a Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) with a "proper" cabled ethernet backhaul link. But that's unlikely to be do-able on a fifty pound budget, plus one need to install the backhaul cables which requires some DIY effort.

Next best is probably HomePlug/Powerline technology which is an AP (as above) that uses the mains for the backhaul. If you are unsure about the mains circuits, then probably best to buy from somewhere with a good returns policy. Again, you might not get this for the budget unless maybe you buy older (and therefore slower) units or find something second hand, end of line, etc. Don't forget you'll need two plugs (or a "starter kit" of two) - one to locate in the coverage hole and one near your router (and router will need an available ethernet port.) I've never used such devices, but I've read commentary and anecdotes that suggest "separate circuits" shouldn't be a problem if you are talking about separate spurs off a common consumer unit. As I understand it, there's nothing in the consumer unit that filters HF from one spur or another - they're just on separate fuses and/or breakers. The only problem might be if you are talking about separate supplies from the grid (ie neighboring properties) which could be on different phases of the supply. A bona fide electrical engineer may know better than me.

Least good, but probably cheapest and simplest to implement, is to use a Wi-Fi "repeater" (or the various devices that are repeaters but have other names such as "booster" "extender" etc.) With such device, one probably wants to experiment a bit with physical positioning. They need to be located with range of "good" (or at least "good enough") signalling conditions from the router and the coverage hole. Of course, repeating hits throughput (speed) as the original transmissions and the repeats cannot occur at the same time which may or may not be a big deal depending on your use case.

So for repeater positioning, it's more like this...    A----X----B   than this...  A------XB, however things like number walls etc that degrade the signals mean it's not always simply a matter of distance - hence experiment a bit.