On 21-Dec-07 10:49:08, Barry Samuels wrote:
[...] I'm going to run a new telephone cable across the attic and down into the room with the HomePlug unit and move the router into that room which means that we have to either use wireless to connect my Wife's machine or try and use an existing telephone cable as a network cable to connect to her machine.
I have no means of testing the wireless connection between the rooms upstairs as I don't have a long enough ethernet cable to try it. I can put the WAP into that room and scan for a signal which is what those figures were all about.
I hope that all makes sense.
-- Barry Samuels
Barry, if you're going to run a cable anyway, might you not be able to put in a proper ethernet cable?
I don't know what the longest is that you can readily buy "off the shelf", but probably you can find a long enough one. I think I've seen 20m cables on sale and maybe longer (I happily have a few 15m ones radiating round the house). And, if need be, you can buy (cheap) little connectors which enable you to join one length of CAT cable to another. Whikle there's some possible degradation at the junction, this is very unliely to be critical.
Proper CAT cables have nuch better shielding, and the twisted-pair design gives them better protection from interference. For a telephone cable of any length, you might find that the througput is degraded.
Just a thought ...
On the theme of Wifi range: Though I don't use wireless myself (it's all cable), my laptop has a Wifi device in it.
My next-door neighbour has a BT Home Hub unit, which is situated downstairs near to our dividing wall. My laptop is upstairs (about 8ft higher) again near to our dividing wall. Max distance between them: no more than 10ft.
But if I switch on my laptop's Wifi and search for a Wifi device, I pick up his Home Hub with (usually) a "weak" or "poor" signal. The only adverse factor I can think of is that, given the vertical separation and the short horizontal separation, the "line of sight" (as it were) between the two would be almost parallel to the wall, and therefore passing through a relatively long stretch of brick.
On the other hand, my friend up the road lives in a converted old church, with very thick internal walls. His Wifi hub is upstairs and to one side, and he can move his Mac laptop all over the place downstairs and still get a good signal. A much tougher proposition, I would have thought, than between me and my next-door neighbour. Maybe these things are sensitive to factors which are not too obvious ...
Good luck! Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 21-Dec-07 Time: 12:29:42 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------