Wireless signals and modern reinforced concrete buildings don't mix very well!
While I was sharing the 3G connection with a wireless router this was situated on the middle floor of the house, very centrally located and there where no issues with the signal strength any where in the house. Obviously with the new internet connection I needed to connect to a phone line, for some reason in this brand spanker of a house that I know reside there is no phone outlet on the middle floor of the house. So I had to either plug the new router in the living room, or in the bedroom. Given that the new connection came with a bonus SIP account and I'd purchased a voip enabled router it seemed to make sense to have this 'living' in the living room.
The Problem!
This however created a terrible, terrible problem not enough WiFi signal strength in the bedroom to use the iPhone in bed. I know this may not seem like a pressing problem but my partner seems to adore doing this (and it's growing on me a bit as well I must admit). So this, obviously, HAD to be fixed.
The Failed Ghetto Fix!
I attempted a ghetto reflector to boost the range of the router that I had picked up. I got the details off binarywolf.com which updated instructions from freeantennas. And I must admit that mine didn't look as good as the one pictured here because I have the craft skills of a clumsy 3 year old.
The Solution: WDS
So it was back to the web to search for solutions, WDS seemed to be the answer. I had toyed with Wireless distribution systems in the past, but only fancy commercial systems that used multiple radios etc etc to pull together different access points. In my various net wanderings I had read about WDS but never looked into it. There is a good background on WDS on Wikipedia if you want some more information.
Having discovered the possibility of WDS I was then resigned to the fact that neither the cheap ADSL/VoIP/WiFi router (Billion 7401R3) nor the 3G/Wifi router ('3' branded Huawei D100) I'd been using for the old connection would support it. I scoured the net for the manuals (oddly both were only available as RAR downloads...). Much to my delight I discovered that they both supported WDS.
The Setup
WDS required one major change to the current wireless setup. First of all it will only work with preshared keys in WEP or WPA and not the newer more secure WPA forms of encryption. FYI this is because there is no ratified standard for mesh network encryption although it looks like draft 802.11s will soon be ratified. Furthermore the 7401 doesn't even support it with WPA-PSK. So I had a downgrade the security from WPA2 to WEP, to give me some glimmer of security I enabled MAC filtering for the wireless devices we have in the house. So this will block a determined hacker for about 1/10th of a second.
The setup is pretty straight forward basically set the two APs to the same SSID, channel and key, then get the MAC of one router and copy it to the other and vice versa. Now as usual I didn't quite read the manuals properly and after having a quick skim decided that I could stumble my way through and it would be all good. This led to me stupidly setting the D100 to "bridge" instead of AP mode, a couple of days later trying to figure out why the signal kept dropping out it occurred to me as I re-read the manual while waiting for a site to load at work that I may have this wrong and once I fixed it all was good. So a friendly warning to all to set both routers to AP mode, not Bridge!
The Payoff
Happily laying in bed surfing on facePhone. :)
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