Wifi issues

Creagan · June 2018

I'm living with my parents while I job hunt. I'm taking some classes online as well, so I'm not just sitting around all day. I need decent internet access to do basically anything productive that'll help get me out of this house for good. (Job apps, coursework, attending class, side projects...)

But I get like, two bars of reception at best. (If my door's open.) It's usually one bar. And on rainy days I don't get any wifi or have to work with an extremely shaky connection.

Everybody else gets better reception. (My sister in the room next to me, equally far from the wifi router, will have internet access and I will not.) I can get better reception on a laptop in the dining room next to the wifi router. But that's not a good area to work. So I want to increase the stability and reception of my internet access to the desktop in my bedroom.

There are only two ways I can reasnobly do this- Get a wifi repeater, or create some kind of mesh or powerline network.

I know a mesh/powerline network is supposed to be generally better, but there are some issues with the house that could affect how helpful each method is.

I live in the oldest part of the house, that wasn't really renovated. It's 110 years old, isn't insulated, and has plaster walls. The wifi router is in the new part of the house.
Literally every other of my family is situated closer to the wifi router than I am. My sister, who's bedroom is "in front" of mine in relation to the wifi, streams netflix 24/7. My other sister, in the room next to mine, will do a video call with her boyfriend or friends at night and fall asleep to that. Leaving the program on all night.
My room is very likely on a different section of the power grid than the wifi router.
We've got some kind of electrical problem that the electrician won't fix because he'd have to rip out like all the wiring in the house and might not even find it afterwards. Light bulbs in some rooms burn out monthly. There was a "small" electrical fire in the kitchen a few years ago. My mom's bedroom had a plug totally blow out when she tried to plug in a lamp. (Like to the point where it blew the brass outlet plate off & ripped a hole where the screw had been.)
My bedroom wiring is especially bad. The lights dim significantly if you plug in a vacuum, and I've turned on my lights only to have them blow out & spray glass everywhere before.
We've still got cloth-covered wiring in parts of the house. Not my bedroom, but probably the same part of the grid as my bedroom.

So I'm not entirely sure how useful a wifi repeater would be to me, given the house construction. But I'm also not sure a mesh system would be that useful either. Or possibly that safe. I know they're just supposed to use "noise" and are generally considered to not be fire risks. But I'm also pretty sure they didn't test those things on stupid houses with 110 year old cloth-covered wiring.

And I was hoping that maybe somebody who understands wifi systems better than I do could help me decide which method of signal-boosting would be better for me. I'd really appreciate it.

Magus` · June 2018

Are you manually setting your IP address?

If no one is, that can make WiFi go crazy.

Creagan · June 2018

No idea. I'm not the one who installed the router. Mom hired somebody to set the thing up for her after I finally convinced my parents you can get wifi without hooking a computer up to a modem hooked up to a wifi router.

If I had to guess, my poor connection is caused by the following reasons:

Extreme distance from router- my room is a floor above the router, at almost the other end of the house. That's not good for signal.
Router placement- The router, which lacks an antenna, is put on the floor next to some kind of side table thing. It's basically walled off on 3 sides and often gets accidentally hit by dog toys.
We were told the cable has been spliced repeatedly as houses on our block were wired for cable. And comcast won't fix it. (When comcast adjusts service to the neighbors, our internet goes out. And we know that's the cause because any time somebody on our block needs something done to their internet, comcast sends a guy with a ladder into our back yard to mess with the one above ground cable strung along a metal fence in the corner.)
AT&T probably did something to the cable line when the house was renovated that damaged it. (My parents kept AT&T for phone, but didn't get cable/internet from them because they're AWFUL in our area. When we moved back post-renovation, and tried to get everything connected the two competing companies spent about a month shutting off & sabotaging the other service. (We'd get cable connected, then AT&T would send a guy out to hook up the phone line. He'd hook up the phone line, & cut our cable. Then Comcast would send a service guy, fix the cable, and cut our phones. Mom eventually had enough and stood outside and breathed down a service guy's back the whole time he worked just to make sure nothing got tampered with.)
Our town is stupid and, despite being built on swampland, buried all the service lines. (I mean, why else would the internet die literally every time there's a heavy rain?)

I can't do anything about that stuff. But I can try and bounce a stronger signal up to my bedroom computer. Which hopefully will stop my internet from cutting out as often. (My sisters computers don't cut out the same way mine does. When I have issues, my computer says it's connected but the connection was interrupted and then claims I have "limited access." Which makes me think having a stronger signal might at least help things?)

AngelHedgie · June 2018

So, I've got bad news - given what you're describing, it's very likely that not only do you have plaster walls, but that they used metal lath. Which means that you functionally live in a Faraday cage. And given how bad your house's wiring is (and by the way, you REALLY should convince your parents to replace what is an ungodly fucking fire/electrocution hazard that is going to eventually kill someone), powerline is out of the question. Given that, I'm sad to say that your "best" answer is going to involve a wifi repeater in one of your siblings' rooms, and the good old standby of 50' of Cat6 down the hall.

Good luck.

Edit: So a quick primer on plaster walls - when they first came out, the walls were done with wood lath - thin strips of wood nailed to the studs, which the plaster was then put over. Effective, but time consuming (the lath has to be properly staggered to anchor the plaster) and thus expensive. Metal lath was a cost reduction - instead of hand placed wood slats, the lath layer was sheets of metal mesh that only needed to be screwed in, as the mesh itself was already properly "spaced". Of course, then someone invented gypsum board, which doesn't require lath and can be mounted to the studs directly.

Creagan · June 2018

Fuck. That would actually explain a lot, especially why my sister gets better reception than me even though she's in the old part of the house. (Her bedroom wall closest to the router is shared by my mom's bedroom, which got updated during the renovation and was likely modified a couple times by past tenants. But my walls are 100% plaster.) The house was built in the early 1900's. Like near enough that my parents made "this house is almost as old as the Cub's World Series win!" jokes. So yeah, good chance they used metal lath.

If I need Cat6 with the wifi repeater, I may just be fucked. I already talked to my mom about running one (very discretely) out of the modem and was told my father'd flip out & she also wouldn't want me to because it looks really ugly. Sticking a wifi repeater on a plug in the hallway & just running a cable to the computer from there might not be as bad. But we'll see.

AngelHedgie wrote: »

and by the way, you REALLY should convince your parents to replace what is an ungodly fucking fire/electrocution hazard that is going to eventually kill someone

I've tried.

According to Mom she's had more than one electrician take a look at the wiring, and nobody would fix the problem. The story is that something probably got melted or fused about 15 years ago when the neighbors were building their house. (When they had their house wired, the workers somehow caused a huge power surge in our house that knocked out our power for over a week & was bad enough that our main line burned a huge scorch mark into the ground around it. That's when things started to go bad, but it happened so slowly Mom couldn't convince my dad there was actually a problem.) There's no way of knowing WHAT got melted/fused without ripping out literally all the wiring in the house, which would require basically gutting the place because some areas are plastered or something. (Which is why we still have cloth covered wiring in places.) And apparently even if they did rip everything out, there's a chance they still wouldn't find the problem. So they won't do it.

When she calls electricians out to fix specific problems, they never blame the wiring. When the plug blew out, the guy blamed the lamp Mom was plugging in. Nobody could figure out what made my lights explode, said the wiring's fine & nothing's wrong with the fixtures. The lights in the dining room keep burning out because "the fixtures are bad" and we need to start using some kind of electrical lube crap. The whole thing is stupid. I expect the next electrician to blame ghosts.

Really, they should just move and let the house get torn down. My mom thinks the house is stupid and wants to move. But Dad won't because he's even stupider than the goddamn house. (He hates change, is too combative to agree to anything Mom wants, and too indecisive to actually pick a place himself.) The last house they lived in had amateur wiring, was literally insulated with straw and newspapers, and nobody died in a fire so he's probably decided that we're not really in danger.

So I've given up trying to convince anybody to fix anything. It's never gonna happen. The only thing I can do is get the hell out.

Iruka · June 2018

Do you have a decent cell signal in your room?

It seems like a mobile hot spot by the window could solve this (or get you out of the house to work), and if you dont stream netflix over it or otherwise use it for funsies, I imagine you could manage the data caps.

Not sure if the monthly fee on that'd break the bank, but worth considering for the sake of being productive.

Creagan · June 2018

Okay, so my desktop has no reception right now. I'm using my phone which tends to have better luck connecting to wifi, please excuse the inevitable spelling mistake.

I don't get cell reception in my bedroom. The whole house is pretty much a dead zone. And thanks to what I just learned from AngelHedgie, I know why. The house is stucco. And during the renovation they restuccoed everything with metal lath. The whole damn house is a Faraday cage.

But I was able to talk to my mom this morning. And the interior walls have wood lath. (She's seen it.) The issues with my room are mistly caused by me being over the porch. The walls between the house's living space & the porch are stucco, with the metal lath that blocks the signal. So I ONLY get whatever signal manages to bounce up the stairs, through my bedroom walls & door. Whereas my sister's getting a bit from her bedroom floor too.

And while my wall has wood lath, it also has a bunch of small pipes from when the house used gas lighting. So there might actually still be a bit of a faraday cage going after all.

(Before people start panicking about the shitty wiring + gas pipes situation, my mom had the pipes completely disconnected & drained. Because when my parents were buying the house, she smelled gas during the final inspection and discovered that when the house was shifted to electricity, somebody just shut the gas valve off, plastered over the fixtures, and called it good. And that valve had sprung a leak so all the walls had filled with gas & it was finally seeping into the living space. So the building had to be evacuated until they cut the gas line & got the walls cleared out. This story was accompanied by lots of swearing and ended with, 'I wish your father would just bulldoze the fucking house.')

The good news, though, is Mom's willing to buy me a wifi repeater & Cat6 cable now that I've convinced her I wouldn't have to run the wire through the entire house. So I might not be stuck in the dining room trying to work while my father switches between blasting Fox News & crying at Downton Abbey.

I'm gonna take measurements to estimate how much cable I need. Thank you guys for all the help! It probably kept me from accidentally burning my house down!

Creagan · June 2018

@AngelHedgie Sorry, just to clarify- Did you mean I'm running the Cat6 from the wifi modem, up the stairs, and to a Wifi repeater near my room, or that I'm connecting my desktop to the wifi repeater which is connected to the wifi router wirelessly? (Basically am I making an access point or am I plugging my desktop into the repeater & I guess using it as an external high range receiver?)

I'm in that unfortunate position of just knowing enough to understand that matters, but not knowing enough to tell what you meant.

(Ugh, whoops @'d the wrong person. One of the joys of posting via mobile.)

Shadowfire · June 2018

Hey so yeah, plaster walls kill WiFi signal. But newer mesh systems work pretty well. A lot of the homes I work with have plaster walls and I've had great luck with Eero getting through that plaster. The down side is they're expensive ($500 for the three pack), but they're kind of amazing.

AngelHedgie · June 2018

Creagan wrote: »

Sorry, just to clarify- Did you mean I'm running the Cat6 from the wifi modem, up the stairs, and to a Wifi repeater near my room, or that I'm connecting my desktop to the wifi repeater which is connected to the wifi router wirelessly? (Basically am I making an access point or am I plugging my desktop into the repeater & I guess using it as an external high range receiver?)

I'm in that unfortunate position of just knowing enough to understand that matters, but not knowing enough to tell what you meant.

(Ugh, whoops @'d the wrong person. One of the joys of posting via mobile.)

You're connecting the cable between the repeater and your computer (most decent repeaters will have at least one Ethernet port in them for just this purpose as well as configuration.)

Edit: Basically, the idea is to put your antenna someplace where you know there's a strong signal, then use a wired connection into No Man's Land (a.k.a. your bedroom.)

Creagan · June 2018

AngelHedgie wrote: »

Creagan wrote: »

Sorry, just to clarify- Did you mean I'm running the Cat6 from the wifi modem, up the stairs, and to a Wifi repeater near my room, or that I'm connecting my desktop to the wifi repeater which is connected to the wifi router wirelessly? (Basically am I making an access point or am I plugging my desktop into the repeater & I guess using it as an external high range receiver?)

I'm in that unfortunate position of just knowing enough to understand that matters, but not knowing enough to tell what you meant.

(Ugh, whoops @'d the wrong person. One of the joys of posting via mobile.)

You're connecting the cable between the repeater and your computer (most decent repeaters will have at least one Ethernet port in them for just this purpose as well as configuration.)

Edit: Basically, the idea is to put your antenna someplace where you know there's a strong signal, then use a wired connection into No Man's Land (a.k.a. your bedroom.)

Thank you. That's what I thought but when I started looking for a decent repeater with an Ethernet port, I kept seeing stuff about setting up access points & thought maybe I'd gotten things flipped around. (I'm dyslexic so that happens a lot.)

I'm probably gonna go with that. The best I can probably get with an 100 foot cable is the medium-strength signal in the hallway, since I had to promise my parents I'd make the wire discreet which means spending a buttload of money on a brown cable to match the baseboards & tape it down with brown gaffers tape. (Whatever, it's their house and I'm using their money.)

My parents would probably be happier with a mesh system because it'd look "prettier," (and the $500 price tag wouldn't be an issue for them.) But given the fact that my house apparently is a Faraday cage filled with smaller Faraday cages, I'm not sure how effective something like the Eero would be. Especially given that I'm really just trying to get wifi to my bedroom. Not re-blanket the rest of the house (when that already has functional reception.)

Although I guess if I bought multiple Eeros instead of one and a couple beacons, I could possibly wire my computer to an Eero if my bedroom still proved to be a total dead zone.

dispatch.o · June 2018

The option exists to buy something that can tolerate the weather and just drop it out your window like an anchor when you want to go online. I've had friends who lived in an old school building with similar issues. All the bedrooms on the second floor, common area with cable tv/internet on the first floor. The wifi moved horizontally just fine, but the reinforced concrete in the 2nd story floor meant they'd all just "dangle a dongle."

Which I'm sure looked strange but no one ever got messed with.

Creagan · June 2018

I ended up buying a high-range wifi repeater and an 100 ft ethernet cable.

Followed the repeater's instructions for a WPS button set-up, despite not actually knowing what that is beyond the option that meant I got to do less work & still use the same SSID & passwords.

It worked. I have five bars of internet in my bedroom. And used Netflix's speed tester thingy to compare what I'm getting now, to what I was getting before.

I'm getting 26 to 21 Mbps now. Compared to a 2.5 average before. (On bad days it was about 1. I need 2.5 to attend class. 4 to attend class without loosing 2 words in every other sentence.) And it's been raining all day, so normally this would be a 1 to no internet day.)

This is awesome. Its so good I think I can even return the Ethernet cable & gaffers tape.

Thank you guys so much. Also, I guess the thread can be closed now because my problem's solved!

Penny Arcade

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