Best way to cover home with 4g wifi

[ohnoes]

Hi folks!

I am seeking advice on expanding the wifi network from a 4g device. Thanks to Comcast lying about my service area, my newly purchased home does not have a landline high speed connection. However we do get acceptable 4g.

What would be the best way to expand the wifi from the 4g device house wide? It is a large home. My original plan was to use a hotspot and a couple of routers to repeat the signal. I ordered a netgear r7000, and I was going to use my wndr3700 in repeater bridge mode (ddwrt), but the chipset does not support it. I will have two areas of fairly high usage of wired connections (office and living room). I might be able to connect these via cat6 eventually, but would prefer to use something wireless for now (attic heat in southern USA in June is no good ).

The hiccup with the wdnr3700 has made me realize there's about 100 ways to approach this, and I need some better information / planning.


What are you opinions / suggestions on these options?

1. wifi hot spot, Router A as repeater bridge, Router B as repeater bridge (can multiple "repeater bridges" be used? - I don't know what functions are lost using routers in repeater mode)
2. wifi hot spot, Router A as repeater bridge, wireless extender
3. wifi hot spot, Wireless adapter, Router A as normal router, option 1 or 2 above
4. wifi hot spot, 2x wireless extender
5. Ditch hot spot for a 4g router with sim card slot? (just found out about these. combine with solution above?) (lose portability for features)
6. Get usb modem + router, use extender above?
7. Whatever awesome option you are about to tell me about

For some reason, the thought of seeing if someone made a 4G router never came to me until today. Right now I am thinking my best bet would be to get a cradlepoint or mofi router with a usb modem and then use an extender or a router in repeater mode.

Can I daisy chain devices? like have first router at front of house, an extender in the middle and then another extender/ router (something I can plug devices in) in back of house? (about 80-100ft and 2-3 brick walls between points depending on where I place them).

Some of the devices I'm looking at (not all at once of course!):

Peplink Pepwave MAX BR1
pantech 290
Cradlepoint MBR1400
MOFI3500-3GN Version 2 Rev 2
Netgear ex6200
Netgear r7000

Thanks!

 

[jlake]

If I were in your shoes, I would get a compatible 4g dongle for my RT-N66U.

http://www.asus.com/event/networks_3G4G_support/

Or I might even look at something like dishnet.

http://www.dish.com/entertainment/internet-phone/satellite-internet/

 

[Asmodian]

Remember, with an extender you get half speed wifi and higher latency. The extender/repeater has to receive the packet and then retransmit it. With dual band extenders/repeaters you can theoretically use one band for the connection to the main router and the other to the client device but from what I remember from the reviews here it doesn't actually help performance with any current device. Of course half speed wifi is often plenty so maybe this is a non-issue.

Wire the house for ethernet? Or look into some of the powerline adapters, from what I understand those are getting decent and often outperform wifi extenders. The TP-LINK AV500 (TL-WPA4220KIT) looks like a good option.

My experience with satellite internet is that it is very bad, sure the downlink is reasonable so for some applications it is ok but the uplink is very slow and the entire thing is not very responsive. It also has data limits similar to most 4G plans.

4G is much better in my experience.

Edit: Option 5 unless your hotspot has good router quality/range. From what I understand a repeater bridge and an extender are basically the same thing (extenders may tend to be cheaper so not as good at the job but they are doing the same thing). You can use multiple extenders connected to a hotspot/router but do not chain extenders.

 

[ohnoes]

Satellite is 100% off the table. I had it once before and hated it with a passion. It was a half step better than 56k. The latency is terrible, the data caps are terrible, the pricing is terrible, the contract is terrible, and losing service in the rain is terrible. The last time I had it, I signed the contract and then a few months later, got a notice in the mail that comcast had just expanded and was in our area. -Granted that was over 10 years ago. Offtopic but I am highly interested in the low orbit satellite internet Google is supposed to be rolling out. Cool stuff.

I plan to run ethernet eventually. You just can't beat the reliability. It will probably be a good winter project early next year. I am considering just running a 150ft CAT6 cable down the hall and around the house. Not sure if I can tolerate the wife factor on that one though

I'll check into powerline. I had forgotten about that. A ton of the wiring in the house was done "uncle bubba" style (lots of electrical tape). Not sure if that will cause interference or not. Also the two points of the house may be on different circuits (the back point was part of a large remodel 10 years ago). I don't know the implications of that, but I'll still check it out.

I assume in this regard, the powerline adapters would work like an ethernet cable and I could plug in a second router to configure as an AP?

The half speed on the WLAN wouldn't matter for my uses I do not think. My device to device communication won't be huge over wireless, and the 4g will be the bottle neck of my internet (average about 8-10 mbps with poor signal (metal roof). I have an external antenna / signal booster that I am hoping will help).

At this point I am leaning toward Cradlepoint or MOFI with a Pantech ulm290 modem and then extend that with either

1. powerline adapter
2. wifi extender
3. ethernet on the ground until cooler and wage epic battle with wife

Thanks for advice. Keep it coming!

 

[Asmodian]

Satellite is 100% off the table. I had it once before and hated it with a passion. It was a half step better than 56k. The latency is terrible, the data caps are terrible, the pricing is terrible, the contract is terrible, and losing service in the rain is terrible. The last time I had it, I signed the contract and then a few months later, got a notice in the mail that comcast had just expanded and was in our area. -Granted that was over 10 years ago.

My experience with satellite is second hand but fairly recent (~1.5 years ago). It is also basically the same story; only with Verizon 4G coming in after signing the contract instead of Comcast cable.

I'll check into powerline. I had forgotten about that. A ton of the wiring in the house was done "uncle bubba" style (lots of electrical tape). Not sure if that will cause interference or not. Also the two points of the house may be on different circuits (the back point was part of a large remodel 10 years ago). I don't know the implications of that, but I'll still check it out.

Yes, power wiring can definitely cause issues for powerline.

I assume in this regard, the powerline adapters would work like an ethernet cable and I could plug in a second router to configure as an AP?

The one I mentioned is actually a 2.4GHz b/g/n access point but it also has two ethernet ports. SmallNetBuilder's review of it is very detailed and has benchmarks with different quality/distance of wiring. Of course there are several other real extenders in the chart as well.

 

[ohnoes]

The one I mentioned is actually a 2.4GHz b/g/n access point but it also has two ethernet ports. SmallNetBuilder's review of it is very detailed and has benchmarks with different quality/distance of wiring. Of course there are several other real extenders in the chart as well.

Wow I completely missed that was an AP too. So many options. Well you won't ever hear me complain about that.

There's not a lot of information comparing 4g router to standard flagship routers of others (I suppose cradlepoint, pepwave, and mofi are filling a niche).

I bought an external antenna / signal booster kit. After I get that hooked up I guess I'll just throw some test scenarios together.

If anyone has any questions, advice, or comments, please keep them coming!

 

[azazel1024]

Well, for wiring if you don't want to put it in the walls, if you are at least slightly handy, you can pull the baseboard moulding/trim off, run the wiring behind that and reinstall. This works great with carpet. With hardwood/tile, you may need to take a router and remove a small amount of space on the backside of the trim to run the wiring.

Then to get it up to a wall box, its easy to cut the opening for the box, drill a small hole through the drywall behind the trim and pull it up. Then when the trim goes back on, it hides everything.

Just a thought.

 

[ohnoes]

Well, for wiring if you don't want to put it in the walls, if you are at least slightly handy, you can pull the baseboard moulding/trim off, run the wiring behind that and reinstall. This works great with carpet. With hardwood/tile, you may need to take a router and remove a small amount of space on the backside of the trim to run the wiring.

Then to get it up to a wall box, its easy to cut the opening for the box, drill a small hole through the drywall behind the trim and pull it up. Then when the trim goes back on, it hides everything.

Just a thought.

Because of the layout of the house and the length of cable involved, this would actually be way more work than doing wall fishes and running through attic. I'll do that eventually but was looking to see what options existed until it gets colder.

My equipment to boost 4g signal from outside has arrived, so I am going to install that and then in a week or two, determine which router setup I want to go with for point A and then test best way to extend it to point B.

I'll keep you guys posted and thanks again!

 

[htismaqe]

Well, for wiring if you don't want to put it in the walls, if you are at least slightly handy, you can pull the baseboard moulding/trim off, run the wiring behind that and reinstall. This works great with carpet. With hardwood/tile, you may need to take a router and remove a small amount of space on the backside of the trim to run the wiring.

It's actually a little bit easier to use a small saw and cut the drywall rather than cut the trim or quarter-round.

We have all hardwood floors and I've run new electrical, network, and coax cabling this way. I have an oscillating tool and it cuts drywall like butter.

 

[azazel1024]

It's actually a little bit easier to use a small saw and cut the drywall rather than cut the trim or quarter-round.

We have all hardwood floors and I've run new electrical, network, and coax cabling this way. I have an oscillating tool and it cuts drywall like butter.

Lucky you. Its by hand or trying to do it with a sawzall for me. Routing is actually a bit easier because I have a jig, so once the trim is off I can just throw it through the router.

I'd personally rather do it through the drywall and patch the walls/ceiling despite the time (I happen to be very good at patching dry wall). However, I know patch jobs are not up to a lot of people's skills (either at all, or at the very least making it look totally seamless).

As for when...I totally get it. My attic is half finished on a re-insulation job. I have to wait till the fall to finish though. It is just way to dang hot up there with the kind of roof line (22 degree pitch roof, 5ft peak) I have in my rancher to finish the job in summer time. My townhouse was so dang easy (48 degree pitch, 8ft peak).

My summer AC bill is generally pretty low with how much basement space there is. Like an extra $30 a month. I can't say the same about my oil heating bill in the winter (like $150 a month, which is down from $250 a month before I did half the attic insulation and insulated the basement). Late fall is a much better time to be laying R30 fiberglass on top of ancient R13 fiberglass and some blown cellulose. Especially sit it involves, sitting, kneeling and crawling through the current crap. 120F in the attic is NEVER fun to be doing it.

 

[htismaqe]

Yeah, we cancelled satellite recently and I've been trying to install a centralized antenna. My attic situation is very similar to yours (5-ft peak) and on top of that, we have burgundy steel roofing. I decided to just give up for now, I can't crawl around in there when it's 130 degrees.

 

[azazel1024]

Oh ugh. I have dark grey asphalt shingles. Poor ventilation, though I've been improving it. It only had ventilation through the roof eves (one active fan triggered at 90F drawing around 300cu ft/min). I added sofit vents in the front of the house during a recent reno, but the back soffits are still solid wood instead of vented.

Its a little better in the attic, but a little better is like 110F when it is sunny and 85F outside rather than 115F.

Old house, 1961.