Airport Base Station Distance

[Habusho]

Me and a neighbor that lives on the next street from are thinking of sharing a high speed internet connection. I was wondering if an Airport Base Station would be able to reach a distance of about 100ft; through walls etc. My neighbor lives right behind the house that's across the street from me. In other words it's in the same posistion as my house but on the next street over. Any idea if this would work or any other way to make it work?

 

[mkrishnan]

If it's really, honestly only a hundred feet, it probably should, assuming you're talking about 802.11n and there are few interfering devices in the area at the same frequency you use. But the transmission speed drops off like r^2, AFAIK, so you're going to get fairly poor speeds at whichever home gets the "extender." Things that would make such a setup better would be...

- This will probably not work with 802.11g -- you'll need N.
- It'll be better if you at least have two 802.11n routers -- one at the internet connection and the other one as an extender in the second site.
- It'll be better if you bring them as close to each other as possible -- i.e. have them near the wall facing each other at the shortest point between locations
- It would definitely work better if you had directional 802.11 antennas (you can Google these) -- then you would probably get close to full speed at the second site (but you'd almost definitely need the extender router in this configuration).

Also if you're talking about residential cable / DSL, this is almost always a violation of TOS and you'll be potentially subject to losing your service and/or being charged fines.

 

[Harrison74]

Need help with wireless

Friends,
I am experiencing significant weakness in signal strength coming from my AirPort Extreme ("150 ft. range") to my Macbook. My distance from the Airport is 60ft, direct line of sight, but will not maintain any more than 3 bars on the Airport icon. My air card is at Firmware Rev. 1.4.4. I have the airport channel set for Automatic, and today tried setting it at various other channels with no improvement. There are no new neighboring wireless networks showing on my Airport icon. Does anyone have a fix for this, short of adding 2nd airport in series to the existing one? Please help if you can.

Thanks.

 

[frenetic]

Friends,
I am experiencing significant weakness in signal strength coming from my AirPort Extreme ("150 ft. range") to my Macbook. My distance from the Airport is 60ft, direct line of sight, but will not maintain any more than 3 bars on the Airport icon. My air card is at Firmware Rev. 1.4.4. I have the airport channel set for Automatic, and today tried setting it at various other channels with no improvement. There are no new neighboring wireless networks showing on my Airport icon. Does anyone have a fix for this, short of adding 2nd airport in series to the existing one? Please help if you can.

Thanks.

That seems about normal to me. Apple greatly overestimates the distance. Moreover, wireless connectivity tends to go up and down, it's not at constant strength. If possible, I would add an extra airport express in the middle to extend the range of the network and set up a WDS network.

Cheers

 

[Harrison74]

Hi Frenetic:

Thanks for your reply. That was the same 'last ditch' solution that the Apple help center gave me. But I have several friends who's signal goes around corners, through walls, etc all over their homes. I don't get it.

Cheers,
Harrison

That seems about normal to me. Apple greatly overestimates the distance. Moreover, wireless connectivity tends to go up and down, it's not at constant strength. If possible, I would add an extra airport express in the middle to extend the range of the network and set up a WDS network.

Cheers