I'm used to being connected to the internet 24/7 at University. But whenever I come back home, I still have Wi-Fi, just not in my room. My room is a Wi-Fi dead zone. This holiday, I had enough. I was tired of having to lug around my laptop to the lounge or kitchen to get some meaningful work done. No, this time, I was going to extend our Wi-Fi. So I set out on a quest. A quest that would take me two days and some few hours to complete, and as of Thursday 9th December, I can say that my room is no longer a dead zone.
How I did it
Step 1 - Research 🔎
The idea was to use an old router and connect it to our main router and extend its signal to get better coverage in my room. With the help of this YouTube video and one of my Computer Science lecturers, I managed to solve my Wi-Fi problem.
I'll be honest; I wasn't completely sure what I was doing. The configuration menu for every router looks different, and I wasn't completely sure that I did everything right, but somehow, it works. In a nutshell, all the secondary router does is "forward" all its requests from clients (devices that are connected to it) to the primary router. When the primary router has completed the request, it returns data to the primary router. The primary router then returns this data to the original requesting client.
Step 2 - Plan 🗺️
The way that I connected the two routers was through an old ethernet cable. At first, I used your standard 1.5m ethernet cable, but it was too short for what I wanted to do. I needed an ethernet cable that could span the distance between my room and the room that the router lives in. When I factored in the distance from the floor to the roof, I estimated 30m should be more than enough cable to connect the two routers.
The convenient part about the entire process is that I already had wires coming into my room that served no purpose. Installing a new set of cables looks too complicated but replacing one would be easy. All I would have to do is tape one end of the old cable to the one end of the new cable and then just pull the old cable to get the new cable in place of the old one.
Step 2 - Supplies 🧤
Now that I had a plan of action, I knew more or less what I needed. So I went to the store and bought
- a 30m ethernet cable (cat6)
- gloves
- tape
- knife
- torch
- and a wire
Step 3 - Action 🛠️
Now to get my hands dirty. The first stage would be to get my brand new ethernet cable into the roof. I almost messed this part up by breaking the trapdoor that leads into the ceiling. I made a rookie mistake by opening it as if it had hinges. A dust cloud fell seeped through the gap and into my eyes. I panicked because I couldn’t see. I let go of the trapdoor, and it slammed down onto the frame and took a piece of it. Not my brightest moment. However, I did manage to open the trapdoor, so I got on with the quest. I went on up and found the old cable I was looking for and started pulling, given that I already taped my 30m ethernet cable onto the other end of it. Besides this little hiccup, the rest of the plan went accordingly.
The second stage was the worst. Once I could see the ethernet cable in the ceiling space, I removed the tape that bound the two wires. I then had to climb through the ceiling space with a wire from one end of the house to the other. Mind you; the ceiling space is dark, stuffy and hot. -2/10 experience. Would not recommend. In the end, I managed to locate the Wi-Fi room and the hole that leads down into it and stuck the new ethernet cable through.
At this point, I was basically done. The third and final step was to drag down the ethernet cable and plug it into the back of the primary router. Then go back to my room and plug the other end into my router. And voilà. I now have Wi-Fi in my room.
What I learned
IT professional overcharge
I never intended on going into the ceiling space. The initial plan was to pay a professional to go in there and set up everything for me. I found a networking solutions company online that is located near me and they gave me a quote of R1500. That is way too high. Anyway, I don't think they understood my assignment. I already had cables running into my room. All they had to do was walk up into the ceiling space and pull a bunch of cables. It was so easy, even I could do it. And I did. So that's when I set out to DIY the heck out of this project. And it cost me less than R500 for all the supplies that I needed. Fixing the trapdoor would cost me extra but it would still add up to be less than the R1500 that I was quoted.
Wi-Fi Standards
As I did my research, I kept seeing “802.11 ac” being associated with Wi-Fi as a spec. As it turns out, it's a Wi-Fi standard. The 802.11 is the name of the group that created the standard. The letters that follow represent an instance of a standard. This was useful to know because different Wi-Fi standards have different bandwidth capabilities. So if my router had an old Wi-Fi standard, the Wi-Fi speeds in my room wouldn’t have seen much of an improvement.
Ethernet Cable Categories
I walked into a store that sold 30m cat7 cables for about R600. I had already googled how much a 30m would cost, and found places where I could get it for R250 online. So I asked around the store if they had any cheaper cables like the ones I saw online, but they said that the cheaper ones are online exclusives.
The price difference between the online and in-store products prompted me to find out the difference between the cables. The more expensive one was Cat7, and the cheaper online were Cat5 or Cat6. The Cat is short for category. Cat7 is the latest category of ethernet cable, and it provides a larger bandwidth than the previous categories. With some research, I found the maximum bandwidth that each category supports. Here are my findings.
- Cat5 100 Mbs at 100m
- Cat6 1 Gbs at 100m (10 Gbs at 37m or less)
- Cat7 10 Gbs at 100m (40 Gbs at 50m or less)
I opted for a Cat6 ethernet cable in the end because our Wi-Fi speed peaks around 25mbs. I think it will be a while until we upgrade the Wi-Fi again. In other words, Cat6 cables won't be bottlenecking the Wi-Fi speed in my room anytime soon.
References
Summary
This is the first time I can remember taking on a hardware project. It makes me wonder if I would have been a hardware guy if it was as accessible as software. I've been reluctant to work on anything software related recently anyway, so this was a nice reminder of why I love messing around with technology. With that being said, I think I'm ready to start hacking around again.
As always, thanks for the read and Happy Coding! 💻