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The wife has had a garden room built for all of her crafting needs and I have been granted a corner of it for the turbo trainer. We currently have Sky wifi and have the router sat at the front of the house. The "shed" is around 20-30metres from the router.
I believe the simplest way is run an ethernet cable from the house down the garden and into the shed. Question is, as a bit of a luddite, what do I need to plug it into at the other end (preferably with a suitable make an model would be good). Every time I try and work this out I end up confused, bridges, WAN's, LAN's access points, routers etc.
Thanks
So you can just plug it into your sky router. Then at the shed end of you are only using a laptop and it has an ethernet port plug it directly in.
If you want WiFi, just get a cheap WiFi router and plug the cable into that. If you're being clever a out it see if Sky do a mesh node and plug that in.
Other option, is to try a power line ethernet adaptor. They are a bit variable especially if they're on separate circuits.
What's in the shed that needs Wi-Fi?
Laptop for turbo trainer. Kids want their phones/tablets for youtube.
Right.
Next question then, how simple actually is your proposed "simple" Ethernet cable solution? You'll presumably first need to run a cable across the house; then out of the building and into the other one somehow, if you're drilling holes you'll need the skills/tools to terminate it at the other end; the run itself will need outdoor-grade cable (or weatherproof ducting); then we can worry about what sort of device you need at the other end.
Powerline adapters are probably the easiest option, but I believe it will require the shed to be on the same mains circuit the router adapter is plugged into (I haven't used these things in years). These devices operate as a pair so you'll likely have an Ethernet > power plug at the router and a power > wireless AP in the shed.
Extending the Wi-Fi via Wi-Fi comes with a whole bag of "it depends." If your laptop etc can't see the house Wi-Fi then a dedicated device might fare better but probably not considerably so without shenanigans.
Probably.
Can you get a decent external WiFi repeater like the ones you see on campsites?
Look at the Solwise website. They specialise in internet solutions for IoT devices , motorhomes, static caravans and have lots of options.
Currently doing something similar. Garden house approx 15m from the main house internet connection. We have BT wholehome mesh thing and this is working about 70% of the time in the garden house.
When doing the groundworks I laid a shielded CAT6 cable under the garden with the idea of putting a RJ45 faceplate at either end, something like this - https://www.otscable.com/faceplate/surface-mount-boxes/ . Can then connect the router to the RJ45 in the main house with a standard ethernet cable and then there'll be a live physical port to connect to in the garden house for whatever.
The third option is point-to-point wifi, aka a bridge. That must have line of sight though
My preference would be a cable with an additional router in the shed, which will work over the distance, but will mean routing the cable. You could certainly prove the concept at little cost and temporarily string the cable from either the washing line, along the fence or inside a protective duct laid on the path
My dad changed his provider recently and gave me his previous mesh extender thing, (BT never asked for it to be returned) which is sat on an upstairs windowsill at the back of the house. Good internet over the whole garden and in the workshop now.
Mesh Wi-Fi setup is the simplest, and (though not at first sight) the cheapest option here.
as above, we have the broadband box at the front of the house, a mesh repeater in an upstairs window at the back of the house, and another mesh repeater in the workshop ~40m down the garden. The whole plots covered in good Wi-Fi now.
bear in mind radio (Wi-Fi) travels very far in free-air, it’s walls and what not that stops it. So an upstairs window repeater will happily transmit to an outbuilding far down the garden.
look for mesh kits with 3 nodes.
Not a qualified recommendation, but an illustrative example of what I’m talking about:
After faffing with Powerline adapters for a couple of years I added an external node to our mesh that reaches the outhouse for Zwift and media purposes. It's this one and it works really well. If we ever upgrade the mesh inside I might move a node out to the outhouse just for redundancy but this was the simplest way to do it since I couldn't really justify laying ethernet.
I have a similar office / pain cave setup and I ran 2 armoured ethernet cables out to a switch. Then installed another WiFi access point in the office. Fully wired the office with 16 ports etc
After I did this I realised that the external WiFi access point I have mounted on the outside of the house to cover the garden would have covered the office just fine 🙂
Unifi Device Bridge will see you right connects to your access point from a bit of a distance. Next one on the list will cover 5km!
Unifi Device Bridge will see you right connects to your access point from a bit of a distance. Next one on the list will cover 5km!
I think that must be similar to what I have in spain - transceiver on the roof and the internets come from a cluster of radio/phone towers on a hill about a km away 😆