Will the signal pass through?

[AnOther]

The gravity quip was a light hearted attempt at humour Sid not directed at you anybody in particular, chill [;-)]

Regarding height your 1st link merely says 'Place your wireless router on a spot that is higher than the computers' and the 2nd, 'Place high, and clear of obstructions as practical' neither of which are to say that putting it at the top of the house, as is very often suggested, will effect any improvement in performance which will be abundantly clear if read in conjunction with the tip immediately above it 'Antennas should be in line-of-sight of one another, where possible'.

This is the crux of the matter as radio signals of the frequencies utilised by WiFi are, strictly speaking, line of sight and if one end cannot actually 'see' the other then communication will take place by reflection with the signals being bounced off any and all manner of objects, including people, so if you have no line of sight path free experimentation with router siting and orientation is the only way to find the best spot for it and in that pursuit height may or may not play a part in success.

My TV antenna analogy of course referred to an indoor situation where best reception could just as easily occur with the antenna on the floor as with it held up to the ceiling.

Sweets, are you p****d off or learning ?

Oh and regards 'wait for a posting that they can contradict or make comments about' isn't that what forums are all about, be a poor old show if every question was considered boxed off after the first response or two don't you think [:)]

[mint]

AnOther says:

Sweets, are you p****d off or learning ?

Not even just p****d, Erns![:(]  Nothing alcoholic here except for about 5 litres of Pineau that the French neighbour brought us yesterday.  And you can't drink Pineau at this time of the night (or morning), can you?

[woolybanana]

Ohhh yes you can[;-)]

[Gardengirl]

Sweet, our neighbour in France managed without any experience or expertise to connect using our box before he had his system - with our permission. Our box was in our kitchen, with two internal walls and a concrete wall inbetween it and his kitchen, then another internal wall to where his computer was in his living room. The only other way was through several kitchen cupboards, out of the kitchen door, jump over and round the 2nd floor terrace wall, along his terrace and into his living room; this would mean several right-angled turns. Nobody else anywhere nearby had a computer or box in the country. Our box sits on the kitchen floor.

In UK the box is in the dining room, with 2 very thick walls to the living room, where my husband sometimes sits with the computer in the evenings. The only thing he ever has to do occasionally is to lift the computer up high and waggle it about a bit. I gather that's to catch the signal, although the box is just sitting on the desk, not high up at all.

So maybe you'll be able to find a good place without using the bedroom for it. I do like the budgie idea, though! I find the only thing I dislike about our internet radio is the fairly bright light it gives out at night on even the lowest setting. We haven't resorted to treating it like a budgie yet though! [:)]

[mint]

GG, are you sure you haven't been describing the antics of the man all dressed in black to deliver the lady the box of chocolates because "she just loves Milk Tray"?  Jumping over balconies indeed....!  Anyway, that advert was filmed from a friend's balcony in Mevagissy or Megavissy, whatever, in a place called Cornwall, LOL.

[Chancer]

I have learnt a lot about wi-fi by experimentation the last few days and am now very sceptic about it, I can also finally understand the immense advantages of a house wired to the current normes regarding coffret de communications domotique.

I will try to keep this simple, until now I have had the Freebox 3m line of site to my television and 4m to my computer, both were linked by wi-fi as I didnt have the presence of mind to use cat 5 cable instead of telephone cable when I did my electrical installation, it wasnt a requirement then.

Recently I got a wi-fi internet radio and the fun started, I am using it in the grenier and on a good day the wireless signal could reach 75% on a bad day much lower and it would frequently not connect at all, even with good signal strength come 4.30 when the internet traffic got busy it would frequently buffer, sometimes 3 times during one record, lose the network, refuse to reconnect and just generally deconner. It was much better when placed near to the Freebox but still not perfect.

So I have now moved the Freebox to a mid position which means that whilst the internet radio is massively improved the signals to the telly and my computer are weaker, the computer says "signal excellent" but what does that actually mean?, the internet connection via wi-fi computer has always been slow at at 1-2 mb/sec but I was shocked 2 days ago to find that it had fallen to 300kb/sec at 5 O clock yet after midnight it went up to 4 mb/sec, what has always struck me was that may times nothing at all seemed to happen, at least on the wi-fi radio I could see it was buffering or had lost the connection.

Yesterday I connected up a long ethernet cable between my computer and the Freebox, wow what a difference!!! I now have a minimum of 3.5mb/sec even at peak periods with both the telly and the radio sharing the internet connection, before I would have to switch them off, and there are never any dead periods, I now realise that there must have been many peturbations of the wi-fi signal.

Today I found something even more surprising which in hindsight may have been affacting my wi-fi computer connection for years, the signal to the television despite presumably being weaker did not cause any problems, no frezig or pixelation even when I set it to HD reception, that is untill I used my microwave oven, it cut the reception dead!!!

Having done some tests I have found not surprisingly that it works fine if connected by an ethernet cable and that the interference is worse when heating a bowl of porridge (complete loss of signal) than reheating a cup of coffee (soem pixelation) and that it is worse on some channels than on others.

Hence forth I am going to se mefier with anything wi-fi,  I  regret having bought an internet radio that doesnt have an ethernet port and not wired my flat in the way that is now required by the normes, in a conforming dwelling it would simply be a case of putting the Freebox/Livebox whatever in the GTL, and connecting the computer, television HD box, interet radio etc using the RJ45 sockets in each room to it using  the barrette de brassage in the coffret de communications.

I now realise that the new electrical normes are really forward thinking.

I am no techy expert so please feel free to comment on or correct anything that I have written as I still have the problem of how to permanantly connect all these items, at the moment the ethernet cable gose out the window and across the courtyard and I keep tripping up on it.

[Quillan]

Didn't you say somewhere you have quite an old 'box' and if so what version of WiFi are you using a, b, g or n as it can make a difference with the speed and distance. You really need a minimum of g but n would be even better.

[Chancer]

I have no idea Q, the Freebox is the one before the new whizzbang one, IIRC I got it the late end of 2007.

My wi-fi dongle has 54mb/sec written on it, my homme qui sait checked what type of network card I had in my old PC and pronounced it OK, well better atleast than the sh*te one he thought I may have had.

[Chancer]

This; [URL=http://www.speedtest.net][IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/1092034663.png[/IMG][/URL]

is the speed i am now getting with the ethernet cable at the time when my computer is usually at its slowest, I will efit the dongle, connect via wifi and post the results toute de suite.

Well actually I wont as I appear to have removed something, when I plug in the dongle i get the bing-bong sound but it doesnt do any more and does not show the wifi connection or flash the light on the dongle.

[Quillan]

It will be a 'b' or a 'g' then. Some devices like the Netgear WPN range access points do have the ability to go faster and further but it's not really an approved version of WiFi and you need the two 'ends' to be compatible to get the distance and speed.

54mbs is about the fastest you can go at the moment for home use, you will get pixelation and other errors if you want to send HDMI over the network, I have experienced this myself with my Media Extender and have reverted to a cable. If you do this then make sure you have a switched hub and not a multiplexed one. Basically with multiplexed if you put 100mbs in and have two devices attached each gets 50mbs each so you divide the speed in by the amount of active ports out and that's what the speed of each port will be. A switched hub will switch, very fast, the full 100mbs from one port to the next active port, hope that's clear enough without being too technical.

Is it not possible to use the old phone cables you installed as 'pull cords' to pull Cat5 cable through the conduit/trunking?

[Chancer]

I might be able to pull them through Q but when I cabled here I didnt use the large gaine as now required by the regs, another good idea as this stuff soon becomes obsolete, other gaines I tried to pull didnt want to know.

For the moment with the freebox in the main building I only need to drill a hole through to my bedroom from the ground floor and all will be OK until I do the last 2 flats on that level, at that point the Freebox can come back inside.

That is unless the microwave interference becomes a problem, it didnt do it at all earlier tonight!