Question Seeking outdoor repeater advice

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jhsachs

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Apr 10, 2009
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I'm looking for advice on selecting a WiFi repeater. This is complicated, but I'll try to keep it short.

I need an outside WiFi repeater to get signal in my garage. I searched Amazon for "Outdoor WiFi repeaters" and found a lot of listings filled with buzzwords, most of which I ignored because I didn't recognize them. I selected the TP-Link CPE210 because it's made by a reputable company and isn't too expensive.

When it came I read the instructions, but they didn't make sense. I realized that one of the buzzwords I had ignored, CPE, meant "customer premises equipment." In other words, this is not a WiFi router at all.

After I learned the distinctions between CPU, WiFi repeaters, and WiFi extenders, I wanted to return the CPE device and get a real outdoor repeater. I had a lot of trouble finding one. The vendors of the less expensive devices apparently don't understand what "repeater" and "extender" mean, so lot of descriptions use the two terms interchangeably, and they don't tell me anything.

I settled on the Todaair Outdoor AC1200. The description says unambiguously that it has a "repeater" mode, and by now I'm willing to settle for that.

But I've never heard of Todaair before, which makes me nervous. Will they be around a year from now?

On the other hand, I found that the CPE210 has a repeater mode, so I could keep it. But it's not primarily intended for that type of use, so I wonder whether it would work as well. Also its bandwidth is 300 Mbps, while the Todaair is 1200 Mbps. I don't need a lot of bandwidth, though. The only devices this repeater will serve are my car and its EV charger, and neither one wants to stream movies.)

Which device should I choose? Or is there a third one that will serve me better?
 
Make and model router?

What is the distance between router and garage?

What is in between router and garage: other buildings, walls, hills, trees, etc.?

Is there a power source available at or close to the midway point between router and garage.

There may be additional questions and comments.
 
The TP-Link equivalent to that Todaair would be their EAP225-Outdoor. As with the Todaair it is primarily an outdoor access point, and a recent firmware update has added relay/repeater capability.

As for the CPE210, that's primarily a point-to-point bridge with a claimed 5km range, so you would normally use two of them. And most people would consider even wireless-B speeds at 5km to be pretty impressive so it doesn't make sense to add any modes that don't work more than 50' away.

The most logical thing to try first is to simply mount an outdoor AP outside your house facing the garage, as it may work well enough and avoid the half-bandwidth and double-latency penalty of repeater modes. If that proves insufficient, the next step to add would be another outdoor AP mounted outside the garage in wireless client mode--connected to the outdoor house AP, that would be your wireless bridge and you could connect an ethernet switch and/or AP inside the garage to it.

The correct usage of a repeater involves placing it midway between the two points, which in your case would be halfway to the garage where you probably don't have a power outlet and it would be exposed to weather, given you are looking at outdoor appliances. If you put it at the house or at the garage then it can't work any better than an AP so you'd get only the minuses of a repeater.
 
TPLink CPE manual and modes. CPE apparently is directional.

https://static.tp-link.com/res/down/doc/CPE210_V1.1_IG.pdf

https://www.tp-link.com/us/configur..._wbs_/?configurationId=18702#_idTextAnchor005

Don't know how far your detached garage is from your house and what wall material your garage uses and whether it has window facing the house.

Assuming the left side of the diagrams shows the house and right side indicates the garage part.

Everyone wants to spend less money and use fewer devices to get job done. However, I think you will need at least one CPE210 for outdoor and one router running in AP mode in the garage, since wifi signal in most cases can't penetrate stucco / concrete wall unless your garage uses wood.

Then you put CPE210 on the outside of the garage and drill a hole on the garage's wall. Setup a wifi router in AP mode ( with its own SSID) inside of the garage, uplink one of its LAN ports to CPE210 LAN1 port (the other port LAN0 is for POE adapter)

It's better to run your house and garage in the same network so you can access everything in the same network. Using a router / run garage network in router mode means you can't access devices in the garage easily from your house.

==

Well, it seems you can try something like this Wavelink WISP router first in the garage see if it works. If it doesn't, then you can add CPE210.

https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Touchlink-Beamforming-High-Gain-Connections/dp/B07WNV36B2
 
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Thanks for the responses. Not everything everyone said makes sense to me, but I'll respond as I can.

First, in general: The garage is about 30 feet from the house, but is built into a hillside. On the side facing the house, the garage's roof is at ground level. Also, the garage has a metal roof.

The router is on the far side of the house at desk level. It is probably 25 feet away from the exterior wall that faces the garage, and there is one interior wall between.

There's a stairway from the rear of the garage up to the house's level. My plan is to mount a repeater on one of its support posts, a foot or so above "upstairs" ground level. From there it will have a line of sight to the routerthat passes through only the two intervening walls and some bushes. I tested WiFi strength at that location with my phone; it gives me two bars. The line of sight from that point to the devices is shorter, and passes through only one wooden wall, so signal strength should not be an issue.

There's an exterior outlet at the bottom of the stairs; my plan is to tack an exterior extension cord across one of the stairway's risers, then up the outside of the stringer to the post. Or I could ask my contractor to run conduit, but that would cost a lot more.

Now I'll answer the questions that are not answered above.

Ralston18 first. The router is from Xfinity, and the signage on it isn't very informative. The label says "PN: CGM4331COM," if that helps.

BFG-9000: Remember what this is for: configuring an EV charger and sending remote commands to my car. I won't be doing anything in the garage that requires high bandwidth or low latency, so none of those issues are important to me. I suspect that if I were somehow limited to dial-up modem speed, it would work just fine!

I'm looking at an exterior device because, due to the geometry of the house and garage, a line of sight from any point in or on the house to any point in or on the garage would have to pass through either several feet of earth and the garage's concrete wall, or the garage's metal roof. I don't think there's a way I could do it with multiple repeaters, all interior, either.
 
For just 30' + 25, I would use direct-burial ethernet cable and a POE-powered AP such as the mentioned EAP225-Outdoor... inside the garage. It's most reliable to use wired, to an AP as close to the clients as possible because that should work even with heavy interference as the SNR would still be high. Even if you can't run it very directly, wire is cheap and reliable to 328'

Normally, connecting two buildings with ethernet cable is considered problematic due to possible ground differences, but if the AP isn't powered by anything inside the garage and all clients connect wirelessly (the EAP225-Outdoor has only one LAN port so it's not like you could plug anything in, and it comes with a POE power injector), this won't be a problem.

Your EV or charger could occasionally receive some pretty large firmware updates over wifi and a reasonable speed would allow safety updates to install themselves sooner.
 
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@BFG-9000, I appreciate the effort you're making, but I'm afraid you're focused on giving me the best possible connection without regard to the parameters I've described.

To install a wired modem I'd have to hire a contractor to, among other things, run cable through walls, dig a trench that would probably cut through large tree roots, cut a piece out of a concrete walkway that runs between the house and the garage, and repair the walkway once the cable was laid. The whole job would probably cost $10,000 or so. If that were my only option, I'd say eff it and forget about having internet in the garage.

But it's not my only option. I can install an outdoor repeater on the stairway's support post. Total expense: the cost of the repeater plus $30 or so for the extension cord and a few cents for staples. The connection won't be top quality, but I don't care. See, again, my description of how this AP will be used.

Let's say the charger could update its firmware in 10 minutes through a wired AP, and the repeater's performance will be so poor that it takes six hours. If it starts at midnight, it'll still be done before I get up in the morning.

Can we please return to my original question? For the use I'm proposing, would I be better off using the CPE device I mistakenly bought, or returning it and buying a purpose-designed repeater; and if the latter, which one?
 
Normally, the most important thing in a network is not performance or latency but reliability. Repeaters are not reliable, so for wireless you really should be looking at three devices as I suggested in my first post in this thread--an AP outside the house, another in wireless client mode outside the garage, and an AP inside the garage. If the garage wasn't clad in metal then you could get away with a repeater in place of the latter two or even all three.

But if reliability isn't important, why not instead consider a set of powerline adapters? They will work so long as the house and garage share the same breaker panel and may give you ~20Mbps+ to an ethernet jack within the garage, to which you can connect an AP (there are also some powerline adapters with N300 or AC1200 wifi on one, in which case you would only need the pair of adapters, but of course those are more expensive).

Understand, AC wiring is not twisted pair so will accept all sorts of interference. If you are OK with not being able to connect to the car or charger while someone is say, using the clothes dryer or microwave then they can work but not reliably. The number of requests for retransmit of corrupted packets can overwhelm low-powered devices without much CPU and crash them or just drop the link, in which case it's not 6 hours but never until you go out and reset the charger only for it to quit again later--an exercise in frustration. And as with the repeater it can be near impossible to troubleshoot why it's not working.

However the big plus of powerline adapters is the installation--you just plug them in! You don't sound like someone who minds returning stuff to Amazon so might be worth a try.
 
@cruisetung, did you read my description of the geometry? There are no unobstructed lines of sight from the interior of the house to the interior of the garage. Please excuse my frustration, but I keep asking a fairly simple question and getting answers to questions I didn't ask.

@BFG-9000, I considered using power line adapters, but because of how the wiring is laid out, I think they're unlikely to work. The garage's power goes from the main panel through a buried cable about 100 feet long to a subpanel in the garage, then gets split out to outlets. Going through a panel and a subpanel sounds like a deal killer to me.

I've got a powerline adapter set that's several years old but never used (ZyXEL HD 2000). If I get an indoor AP to attach to it, I could try that. But if it doesn't work, and I'm skeptical that it will, I'll have to return yet another gadget. I'd rather get this right on the second try than keep guessing. I don't mind occasional returns to Amazon, but I try to keep them well under 10% of orders, and ordering something I'm pretty sure I'll return is unattractive.

I used to have an indoor repeater that I used to get signal at the far end of my house. I used it for light Internet access and had no problems with it. Maybe it was unreliable and I just didn't notice because I didn't know any better, but if I can get the same quality of service in the garage, it will be good enough.

If you really think powerline adapters are the way to go, I'll order an indoor AP and try them. I already have the adapters, as I said, but if you could recommend a reliable, simple, cheap AP, that would help.
 
You do not need a actual AP. A old router will and most repeater will also if they have a ethenet port. You just need to set them to AP mode. If it works you can then consider a AP later

I did not read this thread since other seem to have good recommendation. Generally for any kind of wifi to work you must have clear line of sight. Even the water in the air absorbs signal so everything the signal must pass through reduces the distance you get a usable signal.
 
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I tried the power line adapter, and somewhat to my surprise, it works. I haven't tried to connect anything to it, but its diagnostic light eventually turned green, which indicates reasonable signal quality and speed.

So, I guess I'm going to return the wireless outdoor AP I bought by mistake, and get a simple indoor AP to attach to the powerline adapter.

I had one weird problem: at the router end, the only outlet that's available near the router is above a bookcase, with not enough clearance to plug the adapter in. I had to plug it into a power strip. But as long as it works, it's not a big problem.
 
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