How to extend your home internet to a garden office or outbuilding
With more and more
people working from home, it's increasingly common to have a converted barn,
garage, summerhouse or out-building specifically built for a home office. Often
people come to us saying that the WiFi range from their router in their house just
won't reach the office.
What’s the situation?
You've probably
tried moving your router to the windowsill nearest the garden or pointing it
towards the outbuilding, but often you find this still won't provide a stable strong
wireless link to the outside office or it suffers annoying drop-outs, or can
even adversely affect the wireless coverage in the house.
Let's assume you
have an external office in a summer house approximately 30 meters away from the
house, which already has power but no internet connection. The house already
has a Broadband connection with a WiFi router in the hallway. The garden office
has two PCs, a network printer and you would also like to use a laptop and iPad
wirelessly in the office. You can't get a signal in the office from the WiFi
router in the house but you want to share the broadband as no-one wants to pay
for another line - right!?
What’s the solution?
Well, the simplest
way to do this is with a WiFi point to point link. This means you have a
dedicated WiFi link between your house and the office providing maximum
data-throughput with no drop outs. At the office end, you're presented with an
Ethernet connection which can be connected to a switch to provide connectivity
for all the desktop PCs, printers etc and to a WiFi access point to provide
WiFi for your iPad and laptop. Happy days!
What is a WiFi Point-to-Point link (PtP)?
The WiFi
Point-to-Point link consists of a pair of outdoor WiFi access points for a
dedicated link between the two points. This link runs on a completely different
frequency to that of the house Wi-Fi, so it doesn't cause any interference or
affect the range in any way.
Is it difficult to install?
No, it's easy to
install but sometimes requires a bit of drilling. We mount one of the bridges
on the outside of the main house and the other on the office building, the
higher the better. The unit on the side of the house needs to be connected via
an Ethernet cable to the WiFi router.
For ease of
installation you can always use Homeplugs to provide a physical Ethernet port
where the cable enters the building rather than moving the router. Alternatively,
a more long term solution is to lay cable is between the 2 devices.
At the office
side, you have exactly the same setup. The other WiFi Point-to-Point link is
mounted on the building and a single Ethernet cable runs from the unit into the
office delivering your connectivity, only this time the wireless signal is now
converted back to Ethernet, via a cable into an Access Point to provide a local
WiFi hotspot in the office as well as some wired links.
We will carry out a free* site survey to see if this solution is good for
you. If it is then it really depends on the distance between the house and the
outside office and the speed of your current internet. We can then give you a
rough indication of the costs and any other solutions.
Contact us on 0208 445 6700 for more information!
*Free - subject to completing the job with us otherwise there will be a charge for the site survey.
