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Skip Navigation LinksPC Authority > Features > The practical guide to Wi-Fi
The practical guide to Wi-Fi
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FEATURE

The practical guide to Wi-Fi

by Staff writers  on Jun 27, 2007
For all its benefits, 802.11g never quite lived up to its billing in one crucial area: reach. Many of us had dreams of Web surfing from the back garden or converting the attic into a home office, only to be hit by the cruel reality of slow speeds and painfully intermittent connections. In truth, 802.11g works brilliantly in the same room, effectively in adjacent rooms and unpredictably just about everywhere else. Whether you’re listening to streamed music, connecting to the office or making a last-minute bid on eBay, that’s hardly a good thing. Of course, altering the position of the router or your antenna may help, as will scanning the area for objects that might interfere with the signal – even a rack of CDs can cause problems. However, to maximise reach, some small investment may be required.

The simplest solution is a replacement antenna. Most routers ship with a low-gain two or 3dBi antenna, and by replacing that with a 5dBi omnidirectional antenna you can get up to an 80 percent boost in coverage and performance at distance. First, check to see whether the existing antenna (or antennae) can be removed. Most screw into an RP-SMA or RP-TNC connector, but if your router has an internal antenna you’re out of luck. The safest replacement is the manufacturer’s own booster (expect to pay $66 to $119), but if you can pinpoint the connector used by your router – a Google search should help – third-party antennae are available from around $30-$50.

Antennae come in indoor and outdoor flavours, with omnidirectional and directional variants. Directional antennae provide the strongest boost (eight to 14dBi), but only within a narrrow arc (usually 45° to 75°). As a result, they’re better suited to setting up an access point for a specific area (say, the office or a garden) than they are for replacing your router’s antenna. For 99 percent of home purposes, an indoor omnidirectional antenna is ideal. In our tests, a 5dBi booster attached to an 802.11g router was enough to get a just-usable 1Mb/s connection working in an outbuilding where previously there had been none, and to get a working 35Mb/s connection in a distant room where the existing speed was a miserly 11Mb/s. The only possible drawback is that, as omnidirectional antennae provide coverage in a (horizontal) doughnut-shaped pattern radiating out from the axis of the antenna, a booster won’t help much if you’re trying to extend coverage vertically from, for instance, a ground-floor room to an attic office. (Of course, if you can always change the orientation of the antenna you can set it to be horizontal, re-orienting the doughnut pattern to a narrower vertical space).

A replacement omnidirectional antenna for your router is one of the most cost-effective ways of boosting the range of your wireless network. Replacement antennae are also available for many PCI adaptors.
A replacement omnidirectional antenna for your router is one of the most cost-effective ways of boosting the range of your wireless network. Replacement antennae are also available for many PCI adaptors.


Time for an upgrade
Your next step may be a MIMO or Draft-N upgrade. MIMO splits one data stream into multiple lower-rate streams, transmitted by two or more antennae. Due to spatial and environmental factors, these signals will arrive at different times, creating virtual radio channels in which more than one stream of data can be fed through the same frequency and then recombined by the MIMO chipset at either end of the connection. However, this doesn’t just mean an increase data throughput to 108Mb/s and beyond; it also means that MIMO turns one of the weaknesses of Wi-Fi – its susceptibility to interference and reflections – into a strength, improving connection speeds at long range. While this couldn’t help in our building, the replacement of the existing 802.11g router with a Netgear RangeMax NEXT Draft-N setup was enough to boost speeds in the distant room to 36Mb/s. Don’t ignore proprietary high-speed standards either. A similar swap for a Buffalo AirStation G54 High Power router and client bought us an improvement to 25Mb/s.

If you’re unwilling to invest in a proprietary or as-yet-unfinished standard, and you need a stable connection in a specific area, consider using a wireless access point (in Bridge mode) or a specialist repeater to boost the signal. Basically, the access point or repeater relays data packets to and from the router and client using a technology called WDS (Wireless Distribution System). Everything needs to be configured to run on the same wireless channel, and you need to be careful about possible IP address conflicts, but this is an effective way of getting your network where it’s needed.

There are, however, caveats. Firstly, the process of relaying packets back and forth degrades the speed of the connection by about half. Remember, real connection speeds never match the nominal figures, so if you only reach a real data rate of 16Mb/s on nearby clients you’re only going to hit 8Mb/s using the repeater. Secondly, WDS can’t cope with dynamically assigned key security systems, so high-security WPA protection goes out the window in favour of bog-standard WEP. Third, MIMO and proprietary high-speed standards won’t work, so your whole network will be limited to 802.11g speeds. Finally, while WDS is meant to be a standard, even the hardware manufacturers admit that their WDS kit won’t necessarily work with anyone else’s – and our experience bears this out.

If you want a repeater or WDS access point to complement your router, buy one from the same manufacturer. Luckily, our final option is almost foolproof. Every home has an existing wired network that can be used to extend a signal – your mains electricity wiring – so why not use a Homeplug-compatible powerline wireless range extender? The kit consists of two units: one plugs into the router via Ethernet, then into the nearest mains socket; the other simply plugs into the wall where you need the connection, providing a wireless access point for any 802.11g clients in the room. Speeds will depend on the environment and on the quality of the mains wiring, but a Netgear Range Extender kit ($169) worked perfectly in our tests with minimal configuration, providing a working 11Mb/s in our outbuilding and 54Mb/s in our distant room.

It’s the law
Note that there are legal limits on the output power of an 802.11 device and that by combining a high-gain antenna with a high-powered router you could be breaking the law. For example, Buffalo informed us that attaching a 5dBi antenna to its AirStation G54 HP unit would cause output to exceed the legal specification. If in doubt, check with the antenna supplier before purchase.

Directional antennae boost the signal in a fairly narrow arc, so they’re more useful if you need to extend the signal to a specific point, such as an office.
Directional antennae boost the signal in a fairly narrow arc, so they’re more useful if you need to extend the signal to a specific point, such as an office.
This article appeared in the December, 2006 issue of PC Authority.
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