My dad is trying to get WiFi in their garage and I'm trying to help from four hours away. They have Xfinity in the house. The house has three levels, so the main modem is on the middle level and there is an Xfi Pod on the other two levels to give them whole-house coverage. The garage is detached and about 60 feet down a walkway. The sight line to the garage from the house is partially blocked by the next door neighbor's unit (it's a duplex).

My dad says he can get a weak WiFi signal on his phone near the garage, but it's completely gone once inside. The garage's walls are wood framed with wood siding.

I suggested he get a CPE210 based on the recommendation from a friend. He set it up in an upstairs window that is the closest to the garage, but it doesn't quite have a view of the garage due to the neighbor unit. He aimed the unit toward the garage as best he could. We spent some time on the phone today trying to get good results with it, but struck out for now. Here is what we tried:

1. Set it up as a Repeater. This did not change what signal was available at the garage. It was unclear it was actually doing anything and the main network router did not seem to see it on its list of connected devices.

2. Set it to Bridge Mode. This also did not produce a stronger signal at the garage, but the unique SSID was now visible to show that it was doing "something."

3. Ran it in Access Point Mode. It was connected via Ethernet to one of the Xfi Pods and configured to be on the same 10.0.0.xx network. It was given a unique SSID, which was visible from near the garage, but not really any stronger than the main network. It was not initially set to use DHCP to assign addresses, but my dad was able to connect to its SSID from his phone near the garage, though the signal was weak. When he tried to get the car's WiFi to connect, it started to connect, then failed and said the security was weak, or something like that (It's secured with WPA2). We then configured the main AP router to issue addresses up to 10.0.0.150 and this new one to issue addresses above 10.0.0.151 and enabled DHCP on it. We set the default gateway on it to 10.0.0.1 to match that of the main AP. Doing that made it such that nothing would connect to it, so that was probably the wrong thing to do. Clearly, I know just enough about networking to make a real mess of it.

We changed it back so now the main AP can issue IP addresses up to 10.0.0.200. We gave the CPE210 a fixed IP address of 10.0.0.202 and disabled its DHCP server. He is able to connect his phone or laptop to the CPE210's SSID and can successfully browse the Internet, but the range is the same as before and no better than the Xfinity part of the network.

At this point, I don't know why the signal available near and in the garage is so weak, given this device claims to have an open-air range of over 5 km. I'd think it could penetrate 3-4 typical residential walls and 60 feet of air, but it's not. We confirmed its power was set to the maximum setting.

What else should we try in the configuring of this device? Before I have him buy another one and an additional wireless AP for the garage to set up a proper bridge, have we exhausted all that can be done with this single unit? Any ideas why it did not seem to do anything while in repeater mode?

Thanks, everyone, for your help.