Getting the signal around an 1830 stone built house
I have EE wifi fibre to house - about 300+ mbs. The EE router/hub going into a Deco S4 by LAN. The Deco network in the kitchen where the EE router is gives me almost the same 300+ mbs. In the lounge next door (brick and stone wall about 14" thick) I'm lucky if I get 20mps. By the TV in that room I get 2mps. In my office, which is the other side of a 3ft thick stone wall to the kitchen I get about 40 mbs. I'm struggling to place the repeater Deco units in places of good speed to build a fast network around my home! I have the two S4 units (plus the one in the kitchen connected to the EE hub) and have bought a Deco M4 to see if I can get better signal spread around the house.
Is there anything powerful enough, or cleaver enough, to punch signal through stone walls. It seems like I could do with a more powerful unit than a Deco S4 attached to the EE hub in the kitchen so that the Deco units then have a good speed to work with to build the mesh.
Any suggestions.
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The government certifies WiFi products in your country, and it usually tries to find the balance between providing fast Internet speeds and not frying your brains too fast with radio waves. Which means, other than very budget WiFi router/mesh models, everything else will be limited by what the government says is maximum allowed signal strength.
The stongest WiFi signal you could get from Deco mesh would be from Deco X90 and Deco X95 models, but I doubt even that would be good enough. If you want, you could try them.
For such a house, the only feasible option at reasonable price is wired link. Which could be Ethernet cable, TV coaxial cable if house already wired with it, or powerline link. Or combination of.
Drilling holes through 3ft stone might not be a good option, but look at your house in more creative way. Maybe you could put Ethernet cable through the attic and also place WiFi mesh nodes there, above rooms. I also know someone who just passed Ethernet cable on outside house wall between rooms, from one window to another - not that I would recommend doing it, but if someone is really desperate...
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Thanks for your reply. That pretty much tells me what I need to know in that I'm not missing anything obvious. I'm going to drill and run an ethernet cable through to the lounge from the Deco router in the kitchen then set up a Deco on the other side. It is really only the lounge to kitchen wall that I need to go through as I can cope with the speed in my office and the upstairs front of the house. The back bedrooms are already well covered by the Deco in the corridoor above the kitchen as that Deco picks up and relays about 200mbs.
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Hi
Instead of using "brute force" as with classical wifi system why don't you use the specificities of a mesh system ?
The idea here is to get the proper coverage by multiplying wifi sub-stations and usually by reducing the power per station (if allowed by the firmware :no need to spread energy all around uselessly). And then you use the pathways between your rooms to carry the signals. i believe you may have some door which are not signal-proof in the contrary to your walls. You can even go through the stairs to create wifi mesh network on a next level.
Just put stations, one by one, in radioelectric view along your pathway and put some other stations "lateraly" in the rooms where your users are. The mesh system will build the proper backbone network by itself and all your clients connected to it will be happy through the mesh client wifi network.
The drawbacks of this approach is the cost imposed by your house design by increasing deco station number and the necessity of some power socket all around.
One advantage is that if some links are broken (by soemone passing through the beam and staying there for example) : the mesh system will heal itself by selecting an alternate solution if there's enough stations in the vicinity.
Additionnally for best performance, it is advised to select models with separate wifi transceivers for backbone wifi and client wifi. Common tranceiver will do and costs less but it it is shared between the two uses : lower performances but acceptable and not noticeable except for "power-users"..
Regards,
Eric.
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Thanks Eric, I have re-arranged my mesh as you suggested and I am getting 100mbs to my TV and Amazon Fire Stick now!!!!
Thanks a lot for your different perspective on the issue.
Robin
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