Powerline WiFi options?

[Jeremy Harris]

Although I put a fair amount of network cabling in the house, we still have a few WiFi widgets, including my car and a couple of portable internet radios.  Sadly, it seems that our house is very good at attenuating WiFi, so we have a bit of a problem.  I've upgraded the router and placed it high up in the centre of the house, but we still have a problem.

 

My thoughts are to use something like a powerline adapter connected via Ethernet to the router, and then fit maybe a couple of plug in WiFi repeaters around the house, to give the coverage we need.   I looked at using just WiFi repeaters, but it looks like the latency of some of them is an issue.  The mesh systems look OK, but for some reason some other Tesla owners seem to have connection problems with them.

 

Has anyone got any recommendations for a reasonably affordable powerline to WiFi solution?

[Declan52]

I used another router to extend my network to the side of the house it was poor. I connected it via an ethernet cable to my network so it's not using more WiFi. 

It's a pretty easy thing to do. Mine was an old sky router and it had the option to use it as an access point in the settings. Just had to change the IP address to one in the range of the main router and it works away.

[ProDave]

I am not a fan of powerline stuff, that's a recipe for RF interference particularly of your radio reception is poor to start with.

 

When we were living in the caravan but the phone line was connected to the house, I used a wired ethernet between the two and set up an old redundant BT router as a wifi access point.

 

I wonder what is blocking the wifi in your house?  Ours is a similar size to yours and not very dissimilar layout. Our BT router lives in the cupboard under the stairs which is pretty central to the house and we get good wifi in all rooms, even the loft space above the garage.  It was only the static caravan another 30 feet away that was borderline so I connected the spare router to fill in coverage for that. 

[MikeSharp01]

We have a 3 module option from BT which gives me wifi in the workshop up in the hillside works a dream. It they are wifi homespot 9s they also dupe the domain so common login across them and our in house system.

[Pocster]

Devolo stuff has saved me many times . Pretty reliable. Suggest buying the latest models 

[Jeremy Harris]

I bodged up an old router as an additional access port today connected to a spare Ethernet port on the living room, but it's a bit clunky.  I managed to set it up so it's bridged to the main router, with its DHCP turned off, so it's transparent; IP's are allocated and served from the main router and the same SSID and login works for both.  It's a solution of sorts, and it fixed the problem I had getting a reliable connection to the car for a software update today, but it's a bit clunky.  The BT solution is one of the ones I've been looking at, nice to know that it works well.  I'll check out the Devolo stuff, too.

 

@ProDave, I've no idea why we have such a problem getting decent WiFi.  I've tried two different routers, and spent a fair bit of time setting them up in what should be the best location, on top of a cupboard pretty much in the dead centre of the house, at about head height.  For whatever reason, the signal isn't great at the ends of the house, and there's no signal at all outside the front door where my car is parked, yet that's only about 10m away, with just a stud wall and the front glazing in the way.  I know the outer skin of the house attenuates radio a lot, as although we can just about get an FM signal outside, we can't get anything inside the house at all (hence the internet radios).

 

 

[Onoff]

There are a few apps like Wifi Signal Strength Monitor you can get for your Android device.

[Jeremy Harris]

I've got net stumbler installed on a laptop, which does much the same, shows the signal strength around the house.  That's confirmed that the signal is pretty dire at either end of the house, and non-existent outside.

[Temp]

Our house also blocks WiFi so we now have four access points around the house.

 

I would go for Ethernet based access points where possible as they are more reliable. If you must have a power line access point then I put one of these in our shed (with the tx near the router and CU) to give us WiFi in the garden. Seems to work ok.

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0746HVPMC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

In theory you can set up multiple access points in such a way that you can seamlessly roam around the house streaming music to a WiFi device.  I don't know anyone that's managed to get that to work so ours have unique SSID. We find our devices usually connect to the strongest signal when turned on but sometimes you have to manually choose the strongest. Nobody complains and I have two teenage boys who hammer them all the time.

 

I set up my router and access points to use static IP addresses. That way the url for the admin pages stay the same after a power cut and my bookmarks still work. There is probably a better way but it works for me.

 

[Temp]

50 minutes ago, Onoff said:

There are a few apps like Wifi Signal Strength Monitor you can get for your Android device.

 

I use WiFi analyser by keuwlsoft...

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keuwl.wifi

 

Has a few different modes.

[joth]

I put Google WiFi in my in-laws farmhouse (doomsday era thick walls, need an AP per room virtually!). I prefer wired ethernet for the back haul but used one with mesh and one with a tplink powerline adapter that seemed to work ok after a fashion. (I thought it was failing to bridge between their two consumer units, but actually it was just that it was plugged into a surge protector extension that actually did a good job of filtering out the signal. Straight into a socket was okay)

Google WiFi is very easy to setup but you'd hate it as it's all cloud managed.

The access points were all hand me downs from my own home as we just upgraded to Unifi Ubiquity which I've been very impressed by. This has very nice SME features like load balancing & fail over of WAN connection, VLAN and multiple SSIDs*, and turns out their nanoHD APs have extremely good range too. 

It can use WiFi mesh for backhaul but they really are much better with wired PoE to each node. Definitely works out more £ than your average DSL router. Their new "Dream Machine" is a bit more like a conventional consumer router I guess, but with a clear upgrade path to e.g. add the long range or building to building APs to it as needed, all managed as a single installation

 

* - I wanted this so I can put CCTV cameras and dodgy IoT stuff on their own vlan without internet access

Edited February 2, 2020 by joth

[Pocster]

11 hours ago, Temp said:

Our house also blocks WiFi so we now have four access points around the house.

 

I would go for Ethernet based access points where possible as they are more reliable. If you must have a power line access point then I put one of these in our shed (with the tx near the router and CU) to give us WiFi in the garden. Seems to work ok.

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0746HVPMC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

In theory you can set up multiple access points in such a way that you can seamlessly roam around the house streaming music to a WiFi device.  I don't know anyone that's managed to get that to work so ours have unique SSID. We find our devices usually connect to the strongest signal when turned on but sometimes you have to manually choose the strongest. Nobody complains and I have two teenage boys who hammer them all the time.

 

I set up my router and access points to use static IP addresses. That way the url for the admin pages stay the same after a power cut and my bookmarks still work. There is probably a better way but it works for me.

 

Devolo powerline exactly allows this . One ssid and you roam between them automatically with no issues .

 

Speed you get though seems to be down to your wiring . Some seem very fast - others relatively slow .

Edited February 2, 2020 by pocster

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, pocster said:

Devolo powerline exactly allows this . One ssid and you roam between them automatically with no issues .

 

Speed you get though seems to be down to your wiring . Some seem very fast - others relatively slow .

 

 

The spare router I set up as an AP yesterday is working like this.  It works OK, but is a bit bulky, and being old it draws a fair bit of power and runs a bit warm, plus it's only a 54 Mbps unit, it's that old.  At the moment it's connected to the kitchen TV Ethernet cable, which is OK as the switch in the thing has four ports.

 

I set this up so that DHCP was disabled in the one being used as an AP, with both the main router and the one being used as an AP having the same SSID, security credentials etc, and with both set to the same fixed 2.4 GHz channel (11 in my case, as it seems free from any other traffic).  I set the router used as an AP to a fixed IP right near the top of the subnet, and then limited DHCP in the main router to not allocate IPs that high.  This works seamlessly, with devices just switching from one AP to another without any noticeable break.

 

I think the best solution might be for me to look at getting one or two decent APs that include a small switch, maybe 2 to 4 ports, and see if I can use them where we already have wired Ethernet.  I'll need APs with built in Ethernet switches so that we can continue to have the wired devices connected (a couple of TVs that work a lot better with a wired connection).   With hind sight I should have run at least a couple of runs of Ethernet cable to each place I thought we might need it, rather than just a single run.  I already have a 16 port switch in my study, which is where all the network stuff terminates. 

 

It is staggering just how many connected devices we've accumulated, though.  Just in my study I have four PCs, a Raspberry Pi monitoring data from my car with TeslaMate (and running PiHole to bin adverts), an Odroid HC1 running a couple of Tb of network storage and a network printer, all on Ethernet connections.  Then there are two TVs and my wife's iMac, also on Ethernet connections, plus at least six WiFi devices, a couple of internet radios, my wife's iPad, my Android tablet, my laptop and my car.  At any one time it seems we usually have between 10 and 12 devices active on the LAN, whenever I do a scan.

[Temp]

For awhile I tried to limit access to our WiFi to devices with known MAC addresses - but our original router only had a 16 entry table and I found we had more than 16 wireless devices. All phones, tablets, Nintendo DS etc 

[Jeremy Harris]

I've spent a happy few hours logging data from a laptop, using another wireless sniffer, Vistumbler.  I've also tried switching over the ancient D-Link 802.11g router (so only 54 Mbps) in place of the much faster Netgear one that we've been using for two or three years.  What I've found is that the Netgear router regularly just loses transmit power for maybe a second, anything between once a minute to once every two or three seconds.  Seems to be heat related, as when I swapped over to the old D-link (which got rid of all the wireless problems we've been having) and then switched back to the Netgear, the Netgear ran perfectly from cold for maybe  ten minutes or so, then started just dropping the signal again.  I tried turning off the 5 GHz option, as the Netgear uses the same module for both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHZ, and that slowed the rate of the dropouts at 2.4 GHz a fair bit, but they are still there.

 

So it looks as if 99% of our Wi-Fi problems may well have been from this weird fault with the router.  I've switched back to the ancient D-Link one and that seems to be rock-solid everywhere in the house, and even out the front where my car's parked.  TBH, the fact that it's only 802.11g isn't at all noticeable, as that's still a lot faster than our "broadband" (accepting that I doubt it ever actually delivers 54 Mbps).

 

Clearly the first thing to do is just to get a new router, as it seems clear the Netgear has a fault.  Hopefully replacing it will fix the problems we've been having, without having to faff around with additional APs.

[ProDave]

Router problems seem common, in the last few weeks of us being in the caravan, the router used there as an access point started dropping out with regular monotony.  If you sat and watched it, every few minutes all the lights would flash very briefly as it seemed to re boot itself and then take several seconds to come back on.  I never did find a cure for that.

[Jeremy Harris]

The annoying thing is that these short dropouts in the 2.4 GHz signal weren't noticeable just from looking at the unit, or looking at the log files it keeps.  It looks very much as if the fault may be in the transmitter module within the router,  causing it to shut down for maybe a second every now and then.  My guess is that the buffering in connected devices can sometimes cope with this and sometimes can't, and that this may depend, to some extent, on range (just because range has a fairly hefty impact on data throughput).  The worst problems we were having were with the internet radios.  They seem very fussy about getting a continuous clean signal, and had the nasty habit of just dropping out and doing the "re-connecting" thing when their buffers ran out.  My laptop would periodically fail to connect, but I'd not twigged that this was a router problem, as the laptop has pretty rubbish Wi-Fi anyway (consequence of the thing having an all metal case. . . ).

[MrMagic]

I generally use the following as a measure of success with WiFi - 

 

1. Can the unit survive longer than a year powered on without leaking memory/crashing/requiring monthly reboots

2. Has the wife complained about being unable to get to Facebook/Instatwat/Tinder recently

 

Between my own home and the various relations via "IT support" I've been through TP-Link, D-Link, Netgear, Draytek, BT.. even some Cisco small business stuff and they all seem to work "ok" but as you've found either drop out periodically or require a kick now and again.

 

I've been running the Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC Lites for a while now and they're working well... so I think that's what I'm going to stick with/recommend for the time being.

 

Another thing was to split out the functions, i.e. have a router without wireless/wireless disabled and then have wireless access points around the house thus if any part of it proves to be carp I can swap out a function rather than the whole shebang.

 

Currently got 46 'devices' on the network so a bit more than your average household.. but that comes with being a geek.

 

MM.

[SteamyTea]

Why are we still using the same network architecture with access points.

By now I would have thought that each device could talk to any other device, reliably and speedily.

[joth]

22 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Why are we still using the same network architecture with access points.

By now I would have thought that each device could talk to any other device, reliably and speedily.

 

Wireless bandwidth is already a finite resource. The demands on wireless bandwidth are already growing much faster than the available allocations are so using that finite bandwidth so everything is focused on getting the best efficiency out of this finite resource.

Re-transmitting every packet for each 'hop' of a mesh uses up that bandwidth approximately N factors faster for an N hop route.   On top of that, efficient network route discovery protocols perform very poorly (i.e. re-transmit more often; see previous point for why that's a problem) in the face of a constantly changing topology, which is why existing 'mesh' technology only really works for statically located APs.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 4, 2020 by joth

[SteamyTea]

37 minutes ago, joth said:

Re-transmitting every packet for each 'hop' of a mesh uses up that bandwidth approximately N factors faster for an N hop route.   On top of that, efficient network route discovery protocols perform very poorly (i.e. re-transmit more often; see previous point for why that's a problem) in the face of a constantly changing topology, which is why existing 'mesh' technology only really works for statically located APs.

Can't it be broken down into a number of relatively small meshes, then connect to an AP for only data that has to come from 'outside'.

Seems silly that my phone, 3 RPis, 2 laptops, wireless printer, NAS and 1 Kindle are all connected to one router (actually my phone is the router and I have a second one for all the other stuff.

Most of the data is just local stuff i.e stuff from and to the NAS or my main laptop.

Or have we just got used to the convenience of a few large servers doing the hard work and giving us what we hope is what we asked for.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Just to close this off, I swapped out the old Netgear router this afternoon for a better (but still really an affordable option) Asus RT-AC66U B1, that cost a bit under £100 delivered (as much as I wanted to pay, really).  This seems to have completely fixed our Wi-Fi problems, with my laptop showing a solid 5 bars of signal everywhere in the house, and the car showing 4 bars out on the drive.  Best of all, for some completely bizarre reason, our broadband speed has improved by about 50%.  I can't get my head around this, as we're still using the same VDSL modem, so all the router is doing is providing DHCP etc.  I can't for the life of me see how that can change the broadband speed, but it definitely has (I've done four tests now, and all were much the same).

 

Best of all is that SWMBOs iPad has now connected at 5 GHz (not sure why it never did this when I had 5 GHz enabled on the old router) and she's reporting that it's running a lot faster.

 

Pretty impressed with the Asus, for what is still really a budget router.  Dead easy to set up, although the set up doesn't make it that clear as to how you can set the DHCP IP range (needed to change it as we have a few things that only work properly with a fixed IP).  My only other criticism is that the router admin page is hopeless at identifying all the connected clients, which led to me having to run IPscan just to check that everything in the house was connected.  The router also seems to have some pretty bizarre DHCP rules, as it has set IPs all over the place in the sub-net.  Never had one do that before, they usually seem to allocate dynamic LAN IPs from the bottom up, starting with the first device to come alive.

[Temp]

On 03/02/2020 at 20:45, MrMagic said:

 

Between my own home and the various relations via "IT support" I've been through TP-Link, D-Link, Netgear, Draytek, BT.. even some Cisco small business stuff and they all seem to work "ok" but as you've found either drop out periodically or require a kick now and again.

 

I've been working my way through a similar list and in the same order...

 

Wouldn't buy TP-Link, D-Link again. Ok when new but became unreliable too quickly. Strange things like forgetting the WiFi settings for no reason.

 

The Netgear hubs I've got have been ok. But there is a lot less to go wrong with a hub. 

 

I have two DrayTek WiFi access points that have been working well for several years and I got them second hand. Would buy again but they are more expensive than I would like new.

 

When we got fibre (FTTC) a few years ago I switched to a Billion modem. That's also been very good. Impressed with the WiFi access point in it especially as it has no visible antenna. Would buy again based on experience to date.

 

Not a very scientific survey but that's where I'm at.

[MJNewton]

21 hours ago, Jeremy Harris said:

The router also seems to have some pretty bizarre DHCP rules, as it has set IPs all over the place in the sub-net.  Never had one do that before, they usually seem to allocate dynamic LAN IPs from the bottom up, starting with the first device to come alive.

 

Whilst it could be random, it is also quite common for it to be pseudo-random based on a hash of the requesting client's MAC address. This gives greater stability to allocations and thus helps with logging, avoiding problems by badly behaved DHCP clients (e.g. waiting for the lease to expire before renewing or holding on to addresses after the lease has expired) etc.

Edited February 7, 2020 by MJNewton

[Jeremy Harris]

16 minutes ago, MJNewton said:

 

Whilst it could be random, it is also quite common for it to be pseudo-random based on a hash of the requesting client's MAC address. This gives greater stability to allocations and thus helps with logging, avoiding problems by badly behaved DHCP clients (e.g. waiting for the lease to expire before renewing or holding on to addresses after the lease has expired) etc.

 

 

That makes sense.  I used to have the DHCP range limited, with a block of reserved IP for the fixed stuff that I might be playing with, like Raspberry Pi's, and the printer, which for some oddball reason only seems to work reliably with a fixed IP.   I forgot to set this up in the rush to get the thing up and running yesterday.  I'll need to go in and do this some time, as well as set two or three IPs in the fixed block so that they use the Pi Hole as the DNS server.  I used to have the Pi Hole set as the DNS server for the whole LAN, but it seems to cause issues for SWMBO, who, for some reason, likes to see all the adverts. . .