WiFi Woes

WiFi has become as indispensible to my home entertainment as it is the bane of my existence. Virtually all of my favorite toys are dependent on my home network now: the AppleTV, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Yeah, I know, I’m not going to register a lot of pity with this trove of goodies under my HDTV, but someday most of you will have a similar set of wireless devices, all sucking on an 802.11b/g/n cloud that is supposed to be floating up from the basement router. Well, maybe on a good day, with a lot of humidity in the air and with all of my doors positioned in just the right way.

As the mosquito flies, my router couldn’t be more than 20-25 feet from the gaming and streaming media devices along with the laptop. And yet, I am hard pressed to get a “poor” signal, and suffer persistent dead spots and dropped connections. I have been on the trail of this problem for several months now and tried a number of typical solutions. I started with an extended antennae attached to the downstairs router. The standalone unit from D-Link connects to the router with a ten foot wire, so I can position the tower antenna closer to the stairwell. That bought me about one more bar on my laptop on the top of the stairs but very sluggish performance on the game machines and AppleTV. And so, I tried an actual plug-in signal amplifier from Hawking Technologies. This $90 investment had the world’s worst instructions. It wasn’t even clear from the manual where to connect the amp to the router. This proved to be a waste of time and money. I never got it to work.

Of course the purest solution would have been to drill a hole in my basement ceiling, run CAT5 wire into the living room and connect it to a wireless access point. This would have given me a direct and very strong signal. But because the router and cable connection downstairs is on the opposite side of the house, I would have to run CAT5 all around the basement to position it beneath the living room.

And so my latest solution is a Linksys Range Extender which links to your WiFi router wirelessly and boosts it for greater coverage and signal strength farther from the source. Like almost every piece of WiFi equipment I have used, this made me jump through a series of puzzling hoops before I got it to work. An auto-configure button failed to recognize and transmit my WiFi network, so I had to connect the extender to the router with a cable in order to configure it properly. Here, too, the software failed repeatedly and the documentation was terribly inadequate. I finally got it working properly, more by accident than anything else. I have had to re-establish the connection several times, and I am not sure if this is going to be a permanent situation. The game and media servers are a bit snappier, but I am still pondering whether the boost was worth the $100 additional investment.

What is the lesson here? There is a good reason why many tech retailers complain that wireless equipment gets returned at a fairly high rate. I have been installing wireless networks and devices for years, and even now I find this stuff frustrating, poorly documented, and too damned hard.