[SOLVED] Some friends need a bit of help with bad wifi signal

[MothGirl]

Hi, I move out to the city months ago to go to collegue, were I live you have to use the wifi that the landlord provides. The thing is some of my neighbors says that their wifi signal is really bad on their laptops. Btw they cannot plug their own routers because collegue policies (wich they suck) (And still dont understand why they don't add an ethernet plug too in each bedroom)

Could a wifi extender/repeater fix it?

And just another question that bother me some time ago, could a USB wifi adapter be much better than the on built laptop wifi card?

On my case, the wifi signal goes fine, I bring my deskptop with an ASUS pcie wifi adapter and it goes fine. So I want to know how I can help my neighbours.

Sorry for my broken english

 

[NightHawkRMX]

If weak signal strength is the problem, yes a Wi-Fi repeater/extender can work to help improve that if placed correctly.

If the connection speed is just slow due to too many devices on a router, not much YOU can do about that, other than ask the college to make some improvements.

 

[punkncat]

A repeater might work but in my experience will require information that you may or may not have on hand unless the landlord offers it. In many cases the use of such can be accommodated by the use of the WPS button.

My personal experience with repeaters has been less than ideal, however less than ideal and no internet are completely different issues.

It might be worthwhile to look for the cheapest mobile data carrier in your area.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

And just another question that bother me some time ago, could a USB wifi adapter be much better than the on built laptop wifi card?

It's possible, but it depends vastly on which wifi card is in the laptop, how good the antenna placement is internally, and which USB wifi adapter is used.

 

[gggplaya]

Can you visibly, see in the hallway where each wifi access point is located? These are usually dome shaped hardware mounted on the ceiling. But some are mounted on the wall.

If so, a repeater with a directional antenna may give you much better results.

 

[bill001g]

If you are not allowed to have a router it is likely any form of repeater is not allowed either.

The problem with a router is not the router part as much as it is the wifi. The wifi from other routers will interfere with the signals from the main router. A repeater is in some ways worse. It intentionally duplicates the SSID and in most cases transmits the duplicate signal back on the same radio channels.
Also other people may connect to your repeater and have issues that the landlord can not see or resolve.

If the landlord is smart they have disabled WDS which means you won't be able to get a repeater to function in most cases.

Now what is likely allowed is some kind of bridge device. This is similar to a USB wifi nic card. Unlike USB cards though bridges tend to have directional antenna and tend to transmit at higher power. They also hook up via ethernet so you can place them farther away from the computer than a USB device

No way to predict how well this will work. If this was a outdoor and you could say point it out a windows toward the wifi source it would likely help. When you are trying to blast the signal through a wall to something you can't see it is much harder.

In general if there is some spot in the apartment that gets good signal you can put the bridge there and then use a ethernet cable to carry the network to the location you really need it. If the signal is bad everywhere it is going to be much harder unless you can mount something on the far side of a wall.

 

[gggplaya]

When I travel for business. I use a GLI.NET travel router which allows me to clone the MAC address of my laptop. I simply log into the wifi with my laptop, then clone the mac address to my travel router. Then turn off the wifi of my laptop and boot up my travel router to connect to my hotel wifi. I only use the 5ghz network for my devices in the room so it doesn't travel too far. But it allows me to connect all my devices (tablet, smartphone, laptop, amazon firetv stick) without having to log every single one of them into the hotel wifi. Also, the firestick can't even bring up the hotel authorization page so it would never be able to connect to the wifi otherwise.

 

[MothGirl]

Yes, there are in the hallway mounted on the ceiling