Linking 2 buildings - Best options?

matt_fsr

matt_fsr

matt_fsr

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So I have a bit of an uncommon situation and I'm after a bit of advice.

I've recently converted an old stone outbuilding into an office for the Mrs, which is all working fine except for the internet provision, which is being a bit hopeless at the moment.

Our internet gets an amazing 8-10Mb/s (yea, we're out in the sticks) at the best of times, and so far I've setup a Powerline adapter from the main house, using the air-slung electric cable (newly fitted, proper armoured outdoor cabling) to get an internet connection in the outbuilding.

Trouble is, it's droppy, crashes all the time and is nigh-on useless - I've tried firmware updates etc on the devices, but my gut feeling is I'm asking too much of it as the main house wiring will be ancient and rubbish, and the Powerline is having to jump circuits onto a different wiring circuit to get out to the outbuilding. (If anyone has any software they can recommend to test drops etc, I'm all ears!)

I've never tried/used a mesh network, but I'm thinking of something like the Asus Zen WiFi AC6 and getting 3 of them, because 1 will be needed as the router and the other for the outbuilding location, and the 3rd I'm thinking of putting in the porch/extension area so the mesh network has the minimum of stone wall to try and get through to reach each other.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of kit, any idea of what range it will reach? I'm probably looking at 15-20 metres between the 2 devices, with some possible stonework in between the signals, but I'm not sure how well these things work in such situations.

(Digging a trench for a cable is really a non-starter, it would probably cost more than the conversion cost of the building itself, so it'd be cheaper to stick a separate phone line and internet connection into the building, but that's really a last resort which I'm hoping to avoid if I can)

Cheers :)
 
If you have a wire running between both buildings with a power cable already tied to it then add an outdoor-rated Cat6 cable to that. Thick stone buildings and Wi-Fi don't go together.
 
I had considered the CAT6 as an option, but due to the layout of the house / router location, it's going to be a lot of drilling / ugly wiring to get CAT6 anywhere from the inside of the house to the outside.

Perhaps with 20/20 hindsight i'd have put this in during the build process, but was really hoping to avoid it if at all possible.

(Given our amazing Internet, the wife is currently hotspotting off her phone and getting a better ping and higher bandwidth.... )
 
It's not possible to give you a definitive answer on whether a mesh Wi-Fi solution will work in your situation - all I can suggest is to buy it from a place that is known for being easy to return things to and opening it carefully. Doing a hop from your router to the first satellite, then another hop to a second satellite 20m away through two walls, one of which is stone, is asking a lot. For reference, my garden is around 20m long and my phone struggles to pick up a signal at the end of it when it has line of sight to an access point with only a double glazed window in the way.

By way of a test, move your current router to the porch location and see if you can connect to the Wi-Fi from a laptop in the garden office, and again from the location where the router used to be. See what the physical link speeds are in each location as well.
 
matt_fsr said:
I had considered the CAT6 as an option, but due to the layout of the house / router location, it's going to be a lot of drilling / ugly wiring to get CAT6 anywhere from the inside of the house to the outside.
Click to expand...

Is an ethernet run to an external wall or window a complete no-go?
If you can and it would be direct line of sight to the outbuilding then a Point-to-Point (PtP) link like Mikrotik Wireless Wire (60GHz system), as @0007 says, might be a decent solution - never tried but it supposedly works through windows.
If it's not a direct line of sight but you can get to an external wall then a decent outdoor WiFi Access Point (AP; omni antennas might be the better solution depending on location) positioned as high as possible (gable end, eaves, chimney etc) might offer a decent WiFi connection to the outbuilding depending on distance etc.

Otherwise it's going to be a suck-it-and-see approach as @Caged says with mesh networking.

Just to add, what's a powerline connection within (just) the house like? Is it fairly stable?
If it is and the connection speed isn't too bad then arguably you could go from router to powerline, then powerline on an external wall out to an AP or PtP link to the outbuilding. Far from ideal but in theory it would work.
 
matt_fsr said:
I've never tried/used a mesh network, but I'm thinking of something like the Asus Zen WiFi AC6 and getting 3 of them, because 1 will be needed as the router and the other for the outbuilding location, and the 3rd I'm thinking of putting in the porch/extension area so the mesh network has the minimum of stone wall to try and get through to reach each other.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of kit, any idea of what range it will reach? I'm probably looking at 15-20 metres between the 2 devices, with some possible stonework in between the signals, but I'm not sure how well these things work in such situations. :)
Click to expand...

I do this to get wifi in my garage but it is hard to say what will work for some one else as wifi like power line is very house dependent, I do it over 10m to the garage through two walls and it works well the only problem I have with it is that I have two routers in the house upstairs and down stairs by the outside wall and my devices don't have the ability to ring fence a device to a particular mesh router like you can on Asus Ai Mesh so depending on which one it connects to I get either 60Mb or 160Mb.
 
If the phone hotspot is working well I’m going to suggest a wildcard - have you considered a 4G/5G router? An extra monthly bill, but may give much better speeds than the main house with little in the way of installation, especially if the phone hotspot works at the moment.
 
Just done the same thing of linking buildings together and used two 5ghz Ubiquiti Nanostation ACs (specifically Ubiquiti NS-5ACL NanoStation AC Loco airMAX Outdoor 5Ghz 13dBi WiFi 5 Point-To-Point PtP) . Admittedly the link isn't heavily used and only has a distance of tens of meters but the kit is capable of up to 25km. For £40 per unit I really can't complain - easy to setup and forget about once the initial install is done.

If it was more intensive or more bandwidth, I'd have gone with the Gigabeam or AirFibre products.
 
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