[Closed] Broadband (sorry)

What you running down the end? The cable will allow (not draw) a lot of bandwidth to flow down to the office, do you have something running down there moving files between there and the house?

Is the DHCP turned off on the second one (need someone who remembers more than me for the setting name)

Are they both using the same Wi-Fi channel perchance?  Don't do that.

How have you setup wifi at each end? Are both ends using the same SSID? Are both ends using the same channel?

I would separate both ends, use different channels to avoid interference, and also different SSIDS so that your devices are not potentially joining the office wifi when in the house or vice versa.

Hi thanks all. As you can probably tell from my language I am an IT idiot!

When you say same WIFI channel - we have 4 WiFi channels to choose from 2 from the base router, one from WiFi extender and one from the slave router in the office. All have separate passwords - does this mean they are separated and not using the same SSID ?  The house uses 3 and the office utilises the other one.

i have looked at the master router again and one channel is 512 MGPS and the other 256 MGPS - will this make any difference.

Thanks

2.4ghz WiFi has 11 channels. 5ghz has 23. Could be house router isn't up to pushing 50m of cat6. Was it good stuff, well shielded? Cheaper stuff kinks and folds easier and easy to damage a 50m run of iffy cable.

Could be house router isn’t up to pushing 50m of cat6.

The thing about CAT6 (and CAT5e, which is what the router will be, meaning CAT6 cable is a total waste of money) is it's a standard.  The standard dictates a cable run of 100m, if the router can't deal with a 50m run then it's broken.

Cheaper stuff kinks and folds easier and easy to damage a 50m run of iffy cable.

The vast majority of cable faults are at the point of termination - poorly punched down, badly crimped, etc.  Off the top of my head I think I've encountered a cable fault which was somewhere in the cable run once in my life (and that a cable they'd slung over the roof of a cabin).

You make a good point though in that do we know this is a Known Good cable?  Have we got access to a cable tester?

Start breaking down the fault.  You say if works if you unplug the office cable; what does it do if you plug in the cable and unplug it at the office end?  What happens if the office router is powered up but not plugged in?  Is it just WiFi? Unplug the Wi-Fi booster (does that change anything?) and try something using a wired connection.  Ping each router and an external address, see if you can isolate where in the food chain it's bottlenecking.

What speeds do you get if you just plug a laptop directly to the cable, rather than via another router?

Google have just released a wifi repeater/extender I think.  If you want an all-in-one solution.

Thanks for all your help so far - a further update

I have plugged my computer directly into the ethernet cable as per aphex_2k suggestion and got 350mps download so think the cable is ok.

So I then unplugged the old slave router and plugged in a BT net extender base station and then one of the wifi repeaters and this seems to be working consistently.  It was almost like the master and the slave routers were fighting each other?

The only issue now is the wifi is only 20mps and there is no way to bypass the base station so I can have a direct ethernet connection and wifi.  Is there anyway of improving WIFI speed or failing this a splitter for the ethernet cable.

Thanks again

I think in general there should only be one piece of kit acting as a router on a network. The second should have its routing capabilities disabled so it acts as a switch, I think.

Sorry me again.

Wifi in office is now working fine with the ethernet cable running from the router in the house and plugged into a BT Home Extender.  However it is slow  (20mps) in comparison with plugging ethernet cable straight into laptop (250+mps).

So I thought Wifi for everyday use and then a fixed ethernet lead for serious downloading. I bought one of these to split the ethernet cable one to the BT hub and one for fixed lead - but nothing.  Any ideas why this wont work and any ideas if what I am trying to do can be done and if so what I need to do it ?

Thanks
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You can't split Ethernet like that in any sort of sensible manner.  The description itself there says,

"Note: This Ethernet splitter allows two computers to share one Ethernet line ONE AT A TIME, but it doesn't support both computers to connect onto the internet simultaneously. Just one output port is working."

There are two ways you can do this, a crap way and the correct way.

1) Crap way.  You can get Ethernet combiners.  Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) only uses four wires in the 8-wire cable.  So you can get doublers which shove a second signal down the other four wires.  You need one at each end, one to take two Ethernet connections and combine them, and another to split them out again at the other end.  This obviously requires two network ports at each end, so probably won't help you any - it simply economises cable.

2) The correct way.  An Ethernet switch.  Eg, this -  https://www.amazon.co.uk/NETGEAR-GS205-100UKS-Gigabit-Ethernet-Desktop/dp/B00AYRZYG4 - or about a million others.

thanks Cougar - I will go with the correct way

If it helps, think of it this way.  There's a difference between an "electrical" connection and a "data" connection.

If you had a power socket and wanted another one, you can readily just split a feed from the first because it's "just" electricity.

If you had a phone and wanted a second one to make calls somewhere else whilst the first was in use, you can't do that because it's a "data" connection and uses the same line.  If you plugged in an extension you couldn't then pick it up and call someone whilst the first was in use, you'd just hear the existing conversation and things would get confusing fast if you tried to have a separate conversation whilst the first was in progress.

Gowrie is part way there. One router needs to serve the IP addresses for the network (in the house probably), the second should be acting as a bridge.

You allocate the second one a fixed address at the address server end (DHCP), this is the address you will use to administer the bridge when it's all set.

The bridge can then be set to be either passive taking network addresses from the router in the home or allocating addresses from it's own reserved block. House router allocates addresses from 192.168.1.3 to192.168.1.55, while the bridge works around 192.168.1.200 to 192.168.1.230.

Depending on which Virgin router you are using it may not be able to cope with this network scheme. The mk2 hub could just about. A pair of Netgear R7000 machines at £200 will do this easily with minimal set-up competence required, a lot of preset stuff in the GUI that works for us network challenged types.