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Hello
At present I have a BT home hub attached to a PC. My wife (a Teacher) usually uses a work laptop for her school work at home (which anyone married to a teaching Deputy Head will appreciate is virtually all the time she is at home).
My son has started his own electricians business and uses a laptop and his girlfriend (who is at university nominally but actually spends most of her time at our house) has her own laptop.
They all connect wirelessly. This works well except when every now and then the system seems to lose the wireless connectivity in parts of the house. This results in them all wanting to use the PC
We are about to redesign the house and build a bit of an extension and would like to change so that we have a more robust wireless network and I would then look to join the others with a laptop instead of using the PC and we would all look to share a networked printer.
Is this realistic?
Is it possible to have more than one wireless transmitter/receiver thingymabob?
Do I need a PC attached to the router thingymabob?
Help and sarcastic advice appreciated (but if you are going for the sarcastic could you make it obvious cos I know very little about network systems).
Many thanks
Is this realistic?
yes
Is it possible to have more than one wireless
transmitter/receiver thingymabob?
yes, they're called repeaters or wifi access points
Do I need a PC attached to the router
thingymabob?
no
geek
😉
fair comment 😉
It's better not to use a wireless repeater if you can avoid it. Ideally you need an ADSL router where the phone line comes in (this could be your homehub with the wifi switched off) then a Cat5e network cable (or Cat 6 if you want to be fancy), to a central location where you can fit a router with decent coverage (less walls and floors between it and where you're using the laptops). I used an engenius 2611p to do this, but their not optimal if you're going over a number of floors (the aerial flattens the signal into a big flat disc instead of a little fuzzy ball like most home routers).
Also check what wireless channel your neighbours routers are using, and use one that's a long way from this if you can.
Do I need a PC attached to the router thingymabob?
On some make of router you can only configure it when you connect with a wire, so it may be a good idea to check this with the router you're using.
I had issues with my BT hub clashing with next door and appearing to lose signal, I used to log into router change my channel and all would be ok until they clashed again. I purchased one of these [url= http://www.maplin.co.uk/netgear-universal-wi-fi-range-extender-475113 ]netgear units[/url] easy setup & both wifi booster and lan ports on box, runs xbox, tv and Blueray all fine on lan as well as boosting wifi on the other side of the house