Student dorm networking

[Fancyland]

I live in a student dorm in the Netherlands and we're having some networking issues. 

The building is an old historical building (build in the late 1800s) with 3 floors and on each floor there are like 4 student rooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom. This makes a total of around 12 studentrooms. We're depending on WiFi only, because there are no Ethernet cables in the walls.  

 

The router is at the front door, where the internet cable enters the house and the WiFi doesn't reach all the rooms on the top floor. The router used to be on the 1st floor (2nd floor US), but it changed with the new internet connection.

When everyone is home in the evening the WiFi is horrible, ping exceeding 3000 is no exception. This is probably because everyone has their devices (laptops and smartphones) connected and are watching Netflix or using some other streaming/downloading service.

Speed is down too, I've tested it yesterday with speedof.me and it gave me 40kbps instead of the previous 40mbps. The current internet plan is 300mbps.

 

The router is a Technicolor probably the TC7210.

 

What do you guys think to be the best solution?

 

I was thinking 2 AP's connected with powerlines to the router. Placing 1 on the 2nd floor and one on the ground floor.

For example the TP-Link AV1000 paired with 2 Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO (or perhaps lite to save some money).

[tlink]

powerline is horrible, especially in old houses like you just described. the router is just horrible itself, no external antennas, and probably a shitton of interference from everyone using it. try switching to 5 ghz, that is probably your best bet. that router is meant for light home use, what you described is a small business. there also is no QoS settings so you can't devide the connection evenly. i would advice switching to xs4all with their 100mbit or if you go that far even their 500mbit package because its really cheap for what you get. its 63,50 euros a month for internet only 100mbit is 53,50 a month. if you split that over 12 people than its dirt cheap while everyone gets the connection speed you currently have split over everyone. then you could consider access points and bridges instead of powerline. i know that with xs4all you get a free installer and wifi check (not sure what that is) but they can probably help you/advice you better than anyone here ever can because they physically see your place.

 

[Vadise]

Like tlink said, you will first need a router that can do bandwidth balancing between all connections, or one or two users will take all the bandwidth. If you are going for bridges or repeaters, I'd recommend you use as few as possible. Get one high power router with repeater functionality like the TL-WR841HP, place it as centered into the building as possible and make sure to change the password on the main router so that it only talks to the repeater and nobody connects to it, then everyone just connects to the repeater to avoid the hand-off problem that comes with having repeaters when you move around out of range of one or the other.

I believe that if your repeater alone has load balancing and everyone connects to it, you wont need to change the main router, but I'd like confirmation from someone else to be sure.

[Zagna]

There's one crazy idea if the rooms happen to have telephone lines?

VDSL2 switch but it's pretty expensive just for a 8 port model and then every room would require a modem/router.

[System Error Message]

actually you can run ethernet over rj11 (which is the slot what phones use). So very likely it could just be ethernet at 100Mb/s (4 pairs). If it is 2 pairs than it definitely is either phone or DSL.

[Fancyland]

Sorry for my radio silence, I've been really busy with my internship.

I decided to do nothing and let the landlord figure it out. He got an Engenius EAP350 access-point, second hand, which I installed and now manage. And it worked fine in the beginning.

But there are some problems at the moment.

• It's really slow at some points, mostly in the evenings
• It doesn't always have internet. It's just WiFi without internet.
• High ping, even to the ap itself, ranging from 1000 ms to time-out

An software reset usually fixes it for like 24h.

 

Any ideas what the problem might be?

I'll upload a screenshot of the settings and such when I get back home.

 

I forgot to respond to the phone cable question. My room only has power, but I live above the router, so I've thought about just drilling a hole down and running a CAT6 cable down to the router. But it seemed like a lot of effort for something that might bite me when I move out.