Question Improving WiFi in a Residential Care Home - Extender with antenna connected by coax?

[John-Ha]

My wife is in a care home where the wifi is extremely poor - the signal strength in her room is -75dBm or worse. The home has one Ubiquiti U6 Lite (Range 20ft) or Ubiquiti U6 Long Range (Range 25ft) Access Point per floor installed at the very end (!!) of each corridor. It is an old building with solid brick walls and the signal has to pass diagonally through the brickwork.

I am looking for advice as to the best way to improve the signal strength in her room. The main use is Alexa playing radio, web surfing and streaming TV.

I have very little control over what I can do and there are no mains sockets in the corridor for residents safety. I am currently using a dual antenna Netgear AC750 WiFi Range Extender (EX3700) in her room, located where the signal strength is the greatest. It just works most of the time but often loses contact.

Q1. Am I correct that one antenna transmits to and receives from the Access Point; while the other antenna transmits to and receives from devices in the room? If so, I could disassemble the Extender, remove the appropriate antenna and connect it back by coax. Not ideal, but it would probably work "better than now".

ALternatively, I could place an antenna in the corridor outside her room where the signal strength from the Access Point is -60dBm. I then place an Extender in her room, powered from a mains socket in her room, and connect the antenna in the corridor to the Extender by coax. However I havent been able to find a suitable Extender with a coax connected antenna.

My next solution it to persuade the home to install a new Access Point near the room but this assumes there is a spare port on the switch and will require the home to run an Ethernet cable from Access Point to the switch as the Access Points are Powered over Ethernet (PoE).

Q2. Can I daisy chain a new Access Point from the existing Access point at the end of the corridor so that I don't need to run a new, seperate cable? This also assumes that a single switch port can provide power to two Access Points.

Q3. Can anyone suggest anything better?

Obviously, installing a decdent wifi network with sufficient Access Points is the real solution. I have written to the home asking them to install better wifi as the current installation is clearly inadequate and they are looking into it but, going on past experience, anything done by maintenance takes months to get done.

Any comments will be greatly appreciated.

 

[bill001g]

Sounds like a tricky problem when you have little control of stuff.

Many years ago there were device that had different transmit and receive but that was before what now called a repeater.

Most modern repeater use all the antenna for transmit and receive. What they do is receive the signal and place it into a memory buffer and then retransmit the signal out. This is one the key reason repeaters degrade the signals. They actually run the risk of transmitting at the same time the router does. They also send the same exact signal back to the router....since they don't have any concept of direction. This causes interference at the router so it will affect other people in the building.

Although you can theoretically use coax cables instead of wifi antenna it is not something you see done. It is actually how they test wifi devices in test labs to avoid interference.

You have to be very careful though in what you are talking about. Although you can get coax cable rated for microwave signals like wifi uses it is very different than what your average person calls coax. The frequencies tv/cable runs on is very different than wifi and the very common coax is optimized for those frequcies and not wifi.

Does the tv actually have wifi antenna connectors. So in the simplest method of doing this you would unscrew the antenna from the tv. Run a long piece of lm400 or lm600 wifi coax and put the that were on the tv on the end of the cable(s). You can also get very small directional antenna that will carry the signal farther. Although they make large ones for outdoors you can get fairly small ones that you could stick to a wall.

If this is not going to be a option it gets a bit harder. If it was a PC you can just use a USB connected wifi nic and run 15ft of cable to place it closer. Repeaters are messy to get working. There really is no offical support for repeaters in the wifi standards. They actually are a hack that is bypassing part of the wifi encryption. You generally can't do repeater to repeater but there are some model that you can. This was before so call mesh stuff started. Mesh systems are all proprietary because they to are in effect hacking to get past the mac address limitation of the encryption.

You can sometime get a repeater to connect to a AP. Again this is all hit and miss. The router/AP must support WDS.

Note if you using a open unencrypted system a lot more stuff will work like repeater to repeater but I have not seen this done for a very long time and I used to use third party firmware to do it. Almost nobody runs on open wifi so you see little discussion.

 

[USAFRet]

What about...

Circumvent the facility WiFi completely?
Hotspot off a cellphone.

Yes, this will cost more. But you'll be in more control.

 

[dwd999]

Or a separate cellular based modem system. Is that available where you live and is it financially feasible?

 

[John-Ha]

Thank you for all your comprehensive replies and explanations.

I guess my best bet is to press the home to upgrade the wifi with more Access points and perhaps use a mobile phone hotspot until they do.

 

[lantis3]

See if WISP router with longer antenna will work better

https://www.amazon.com/WAVLINK-Tri-Band-Wireless-Internet-1000Mbps/dp/B0C8D5LP1S

---

Oops you are in UK.

So maybe Tenda AC8? Hang it high on the back of the door, maybe in a plastic wall file holder.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tenda-AC8-Wireless-Supports-management/dp/B07Z7NY23Q

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2XvE47mg9s

I personally have a GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 for a small room in the corner , but its antennas probably too small for the signal to travel down the corridor in your case.