Home WiFi Improvement

[Thetankcat]

Hello, I am a online student and throughout the last 4 years I noticed that the wifi signal has been lacking in my workspace. I am on the main floor of my house while the router is upstairs in my parents office opposite the corner of the house that I am working from. The signal has to go through a interior  wall and a floor to reach my computer. There is about 30 ft in a straight line from it to my computer. Attached are photos of both the upstairs setup (004 - 006) and my computer (007 - 010). Our upstairs computer in a Dell Inspirion 530 from 2006 with the cheapest Netgear Wall-mart router to be found. My setup is a Acer Aspire XC-603 with a ASUS USB N13 wifi dongle. I need budget minded suggestions for getting close to our internet service of 3mbs. I begin school in August and would like to have serviceable wifi before the start of the semester. This is a problem accentuated by the fact that we have during the day (in summer) at least 2 other devices online at once. Any help on the matter would be appreciated as I do not know enough to make judgments on the problem.

[Thetankcat]

Just to clarify, pictures 1-3 are of the upstairs setup and the rest are from the downstairs setup.

[jasonB221]

One improvement you could make for ~20US is to upgrade from a wireless USB dongle to a PCIe wireless card. Those have external antennas, which should give you better signal quality. A free way to get better strength would be to put the dongle on top of a desk, away from the case and any other type of interference. 

[Donut417]

Yeah I agree with the suggestion of a PCI Express card rather than USB. You have many access points in your area. They ARE causing interference. Make sure you router runs on the best channel it can. You might consider getting a dual band router, as 5 Ghz does better in congested area's. Of course you will need a WiFI adapter that supports dual band. Use an app like WiFi analyzer to check your area, as far as good channels and signal strength. 

 

There are also other networking technologies like MOCA and Power Line adapters you can look in to if WiFi isnt not working out. 

[MatthewsTech]

I would agree for certain the whole PCI-Express card as the Dual-Band routers (Not sure what router you're using off the top of my head) but the 5GHz bands are much quicker but the PCI-E cards that take these bands may be a slightly higher price but in the long term it's a great investment.

 

I wish you the best of luck!

[Thetankcat]

Thanks for the ideas! Do you have any recommendations for this card? Also, the router is a Netgear N300 WNR2000(make of that what you will). I also have connection problems where it will fail to have a connection at the router. This has cost me a few quizzes and I would like to make it a very reliable connection overall. Any tips? Thanks for the help!

[InVis]

I whole heartily recommend Edimax products.

Their support is awesome and the chips they use are awesome.

 

I have recently bought some of these:

http://www.edimax.com/edimax/merchandise/merchandise_detail/data/edimax/au/wireless_adapters_ac600_dual-band/ew-7811usc/ 

 

They perform really really well.