Hello,

TLDR: Trying to extend Wi-Fi to a building maybe 100-200 feet from a house. A third building exists between the two, a TP-Link extender I own ‘works’ from this third building to provide intermittently functional signal to the desired building. Looking for a stronger extender, preferably without Power over Ethernet to use it outdoors without needing to run a line through a wall/drill.

I’m trying to help someone extend their Wi-Fi coverage to a small extra building (b2), maybe a maximum of two hundred feet from the main house (b1).

She uses the old Google Wi-Fi pods right now, but the pod from the accessory building often disconnects and seemingly fails to ever reconnect without being unplugged and plugged back in.

She says it used to work okay, so I’ve troubleshot the one she had in the accessory building by bringing it into the main house for a few days, then swapping it with another pod for another few days; neither test showed the total failure as seems to occur in the other building.

Based on the specs of these pods, I’m not surprised it’s struggling, and confused that she says it’s seemingly worked fine in the past. She doesn’t spend much time out in the separate building, so it may just be a lack of seeing it fail.

I’ve briefly tested one of my own TP-Link AX1500 in a third building (b3), which sits between the main house and the desired accessory building. This has provided an intermittently functional signal in the desired accessory building (b2), but with, understandably, very low strength and frequent disconnects.

I’ve looked at additional extenders, for indoor and outdoor, but wanted to see what, if anything, people suggest.

Also, I’m finding some of the longer range extenders to be powered by Ethernet, or with a USB connector. Which, if using this extender outdoors to remove one wall of interference, creates the need to either drill a hole in an existing wall, or otherwise have a cable go into the house somewhere. Is anyone familiar with a medium/long-range extender powered just from a power adaptor or something?

Thank you very much for your time and I really appreciate any suggestions or direction you might be able to provide.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
    2·
    2 days ago

    I’m not saying this is the ideal solution, but I’ve had decent performance from the house to a shed 60 feet away using Asus ZenWifi AX XT8 nodes in the house (with one in the window at the back of the house) and an Asus RT-AX56U extender in the shed. Most days I get decent speeds, good enough to use for work and watching videos. Very occasionally there’s a bad day. I originally tried with the dual-band Asus ZenWifi AX Mini cubes, but they were not powerful enough. Their bigger tri-band units work better.

    There are probably better solutions though, using directional dishes. I just did this because, like you, I didn’t want to have to mess with holes for ethernet cables, mounting dishes to poles, etc.

    Oh, and I once had bad signal so I put the unit at the back of the house at what would roughly be the focal point of a large metal kitchen bowl and pointed the bowl at the shed, and the signal improved dramatically

    The Asus boxes are overpriced when new, but you can get them for cheap used.