Having just moved back into the house after our rebuild, I'm finding the signal strength on my wireless router is nowhere near what I would like to see. This is even with a brand new Belkin 802.11n-spec router.
The router is sitting in a wiring closet under the basement stairs, about the centerline of the house. While sitting in my office, probably 12 feet from the router (straight line) I'll get between 45-58% signal on a thinkpad T41 (802.11g). I'm wondering just how much the construction of the house affects the signal. The new house has a steel beam the length of the building (where the old one had tripled-up 2x12's) and the current wiring closet is next to the furnace & heat pump, rather than on the other side of the basement. I'm wondering if I could place the router upstairs, rather than having it in the basement. Since I only have one network port in the office (one port in each room) this would mean the cable modem would be feeding directly into a hub in the basement, rather than passing through the router first. Since I still want to have the network ports in the rest of the house also on the wired network (just in case I need a wired connection instead) would this even work, or would they end up trying (and failing) to get an address from Comcast rather than the local router? I do have a couple of older Linksys WRT54g units (one v2 with Linksys firmware, on v5 with DD-WRT). We also have an unfinished "second floor" (it will remain unfinished indefinitely) with a wire already run up from the basement, just not sure about the availability of power in a convenient place) _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 7 - Web Hack-a-thon - SUNY Newpaltz Apr 1 - EC2 and Cloud Computer May 6 - TBD
