One other thing to check is the polarization, vertical/horizontal, relationship between the access point and the client devices. An antenna rated at 2dBi will have an output 2dBm higher in one direction than the others, or roughly 50%. dBi has to do with the directionality of the antenna. Additional access points would still require the running of Cat5.
We go to great lengths to keep RF noise off of power lines, why would anyone intentionally inject it into them? If I were in this situation I would go Cat5 as well, even though this would be a pain, but another option would be wireless repeaters in key locations and even if the house is brick the interior walls probably are not. I also agree with Steve on avoiding powerline.
You might be able to improve it some with an external antenna due to better placement options, such as moving to the center of the house, but as Steve above said there are other considerations you have to address with this. In other words with the Cisco that is about as good as it is going to get. You could hang a surplus 50K Watt old radio station transmitter on the access point and it would do you no good if the client device is out of its transmitting range with respect to the access point. That is equal to the Cisco you are using. The Intel 6300AGN card in my laptop is rated at 15dBm and this is one of most powerful out there. Quite often when output power of access points is discussed one half of the equation is left out and that is the capabilities of the client devices that are connecting to it, WiFi is a two way street, and the background noise levels in your enviroment. If it is set to max then another issue comes into play. The Cisco AP541n has the ability to set the output power to different levels for differing setup scenarios, I would first check this to make sure it is not set to a reduced power setting for some reason. Is it gonna be best here to just go for the strongest?ĮDIT: Have just seen that these are apparently the devices transmit power levels for 2.4GHz:ĭoes that mean I'm better off getting 15 or higher? Not sure how DBm translates to DBi. What I want to know is, should I just go for the big strong 18 or 20 DBi antennas (physical size of antenna doesn't matter too much in this instance) or will that introduce unwanted effects? Am I better off using something lower like 10 or 12 or something? I think he'll usually be using 2.4GHz n, but there is a possibility that we will need to change to a/b/g so it would be great to get a strength of antenna that can deal with both well. So I'm planning to fit different antennas onto the ap541n, had a quick look on ebay and saw that there are loads of inexpensive SMA antennas with a big range in DBi strength.
I've since read that the antennas that the ap541n ship with are only 2DBi so that would explain why there was no significant improvement over the HomeHub (which I'm guessing is around 2Bi as well, but internal so bit more loss). We tried a Cisco AP541n which I have seen work quite well before range wise, but in this case it was only slightly more powerful than the BT HomeHub according to inSSIDer on 2 different machines. He is currently using a BT HomeHub (think it's version 3) and the wifi signal doesn't reach to about half the house on the other side and isn't great on the side that it does reach to. Note: We recommend the Edimax AC1750 (3x3) or Linksys WUSB6300 (2x2) adapter.This question is for a friend of mine who is a home user with a fairly big old detatched house (about 325 square metres), nearest neighbour is about 25 metres away. * Requires supported Wi-Fi adapter for packet capture. Identify top talkers across networks with All Clients tab*Ĭollaborate with teammates on- and off-site using shared Snapshot dataĪnalyze AP-to-client traffic quality with real-time treepie charts* See signal strength and utilization from the client device perspective*Įxpertly assess connection quality with real-time MCS Index, spatial streams, and channel width* See visual indicator when new APs enter your environmentĮstablish benchmarks and track network data over time with Snapshots
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