At home we have two buildings - our house, and the Office/Garage. They're about 50 metres away. At the moment, we have wireless in the house, using a Linksys WAP54G. There is a Linksys WET11 (wireless bridge) in the office, and another WAP54G on a different channel to give wireless access in the office. This is far from ideal - I'd like the house to be linked to the office by CAT5. (Slight OT:As it happens, there is a lot of CAT5 running between the house and the office used for the phone system, and I'm sure there must be some spare... but I've no idea how I'd go about getting this looked into - any ideas?!) As the 11Mbps link has crummy signal strength and quality, we don't get a lot of throughput. Plus it means I can't implement WPA-Radius, because the WET11 doesn't support it. I was looking into HomePlug - the latest and greatest stuff offers 200Mbps, which must mean I'd get throughput similar to a 100Mbps CAT5 link. Is there anyway of finding whether it'd work between the buildings without having to buy it, be disappointed, then flog it? I don't *think* we're on separate meters, and it says it should work over 200metres. Thanks for any advice. I'd quite like to get this sorted, as the 11b wireless link is, to put it bluntly, crap.
why dont you run some cat 5 from youir house to the office then have an access point on the end of the cat5 to serve your office? homeplug is suppose to work well but iv not actually tried it myself. personally id prefer to stick to cat 5 as much as possible!
I would too - but as I mentioned, I'm not sure what CAT5 we've got underground. And my dad's not a great fan of cables on the outside of the house - it was hard enough convincing him to let Sky put a dish up, let alone stringing a cable between two buildings!
cant you run it under the ground? run a channel in the grass/mud, with plastic tube and run the cat 5 through that?
Most definitely. But according to all the HomePlug literature I've waded through online, that doesn't make the slightest difference. Different phases do, on the other hand. Between the two buildings is either paving slabs or a driveway with tarmac & gravel on it. So me & a spade aren't going to achieve much. There's already a duct with CAT5 in it running from a BT box in the house to a junction box outside the office. BT lines come into the junction box and are connected to the house. The house has lines connected to the box that are connected to the office (for phone extensions in that building). There's spare capacity, but I don't really know how I'd go about connecting up wires from the house to an RJ45 socket, and from the junction box to the office.... all beyond me, probably. I suppose BT are probably the only people who'd like to do it - and charge a fortune. Last time I tried to get an electrician to let me use a pair to connect a new line for ADSL from one side of the house to the other, i confused the hell out of him. Had to get an ex-NTL engineer in to do it!
No you dont. Many houses, certainly the larger and older ones will have 2 or more power circuit rings. You just need there to be a common connection at some point usually this between the meter and fuseboard. You could in fact bridge 2 buildings on separate power supplies/meters if you linked the homeplug at one building via ethernet cable to the homeplug in another. Repeating in this way extends range past 200m. Examples are given on the devolo and other suppliers webpages.
If security is enabled on the homeplug devices, traffic between them is encrypted. Nothing plugged into the homeplug ethernet connection needs homeplug software or drivers. You can and should reconfigure the default homeplug password using the homeplug utility. The sytem is pretty secure unless you give your neighbour physical access to your homeplug device (same as not giving them physical access to your router!).
That kinda defeats the point of what the OP wants to do. Afaik it will go past the meter, but not past the transformer...
I'm currently looking more closely into the ideal of using the existing cabling between the house and office. Last time a BT engineer came, he said we could get another 8+ lines (can't remember the exact figure) into the house. That must mean we have at least 8 pairs free between the house and the junction box outside the office. 100Mbps ethernet only needs 2 pairs, iirc. So this may be a runner.
