19th August 2017
Making Speedier Connections
During this week we had a new customer approach us wanting to get not only a better internet connection but also wanting to beam it around a very large house. He had been battling with very flaky Internet from a Wireless Hot Spot device as well as the problems associated with retransmitting the Internet signal as Wi-Fi around the house.
Yesterday we sent 2 techs onsite to setup a proper 4G directional antenna and router as well as 2 dedicated wireless access points. The location in this case was near Emu Park and the resulting Internet connection has a speed of around 45Mbit down and 35Mbit up – with a ping time of less than 30ms. This is literally 10 times the speed he was getting from the original hot spot.
With this sort of connection you could easily have 50 people browsing the Internet at once – or even 10 separate connections to Netflix downloading movies at the same time. This result is from the combination of a good external directional antenna as well as an industrial quality router and heavy duty low loss cable in between the two.
Most 3G/4G/4GX “Wireless Broadband” connections are held back because people are trying to use a portable modem/router device from within their homes. The tiny antennas built into these devices simply can’t connect at high speeds in this situation. In fact you will even notice a significant difference in the data connection of a smart phone between being inside a building and then walking outside.
Once we get a good Internet signal inside a house it then needs to be ‘rebroadcast’ in the form of a Wi-Fi signal. This is where we don’t bother with the Wi-Fi component of a modem/router but rather we turn this feature off and use a dedicated wireless access point. Again the signal from one of these dedicated devices can be 10 times more powerful than the alternative.
In this case the house was immense so we added a 2nd wireless access point – but these are configured in a certain way. The home user type wireless extenders that most people buy are fraught with reliability problems and can even fight with the original device. Dedicated wireless access points can be configured to show as the one device and actually team together to enhance each other’s range.
In this instance there are extra buildings very close to the main house so we may add a 3rd dedicated access point in future, however this is not ‘reinventing the wheel’ and again it will seamlessly team with the existing 2. Last week we had techs out in Middlemount setting up the same sort of system for 3 farm houses that were within 500 metres of each other and could then share the same Internet connection.
In our industry all of these devices have changed markedly over the last 5 years and the improvement that we achieved over the previous 6 year old system in this case was like night and day.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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