~ When your kids are tearing up the place in the back room, the living room is blissfully quiet.
(Wait.... is that a pro or a con....?).
~ You don't hear every word the neighbor says to his wife (particularly nice if the neighborhas a foul mouth).
~ Better insulation (Is this true? I just made that up....).
Now for the con:
It is seemingly impossible to set up a wireless network with coverage that extends from one end of the apartment to the other, without losing so much of the signal that you feel like 1981 dial up again.
Some would say that it's a good thing that there are some areas of the apartment that continue to be designated "wi-fi free" {as opposed to "free wi-fi" ;) }. Unfortunately, those people are not me......
10 comments:
It's not necessarily the thickness of the walls but the materials used in the walls. If you're living in a typical not-recently built apartment building in NYC, then you're up against a problem. They used some material back then that seems to kill the wireless networks. You can buy these things that you put at strategic places that bounce the signals from room to room without having to go through the walls that kill you. But now you've just increased your cost alot so I don't know that it's worthwhile.
If you do find a better solution I'd love to hear about it.
I might be able to help design a solutipn for you...this used to be my specialty.
That doesn't sound right to me... people can pick up ours a block and a half away and our walls aren't too thin, nor are theirs.
I'd love to hear about solutions. I've researched this and been told that these old buildings here in NYC pose this problem due to materials used in the walls. Networks that you pick up may be coming through windows or through walls that don't have this construction. But like I said, I'd love to hear about how you resolved this because I tried hard.
The thick walls are a sign from Hashem that internet is osur ;-)
Is joey dating? i have a single sister in NY who i want to set up with him!
Hmmm...these comments are getting interesting. I may have to start reading the blog more often...
I didn't want my house to have wifi access throughout, because the kids have too many wifi-enabled devices, and I want all Internet access to be monitored by parents, in public rooms.
We also live in the city, and security is an issue. (Both with neighbors using our network, or our kids having access to the neighbors unsecured wifi.)
Thus, we set up the network to use our electrical power lines to carry the Internet signal throughout the house.
It is a simple box that connects to one of the router's Ethernet ports, and can be accessed throughout the house at any power outlet, by plugging in a dedicated receiver device.
The receiver, once plugged in to a power outlet, provides an Ethernet connection, as though it were connected directly to the router. (Although it is slower than a direct connection.)
To make everything tidy and portable (because I didn't want to have our living room turned permanently into a computer room) I bought a fishing tackle box and drilled a few holes in it to accommodate an extension cord, power strip, Ethernet hub (to allow up to 4 laptops to connect to the web via this box), and laptop power cables. We call it the "Network Box".
I outfitted the Ethernet hub in this box with retractable (thus tiny and untangled) Ethernet cables.
So, in any room in the house, we plug in the power cable that hangs out the back of the Network box, and open its top cover to reveal power and network connections for 4laptops.
When finished, we stow the family laptops and the tackle box in one shelf in a living room cabinet, freeing the coffee table from all the computer clutter.
This system has worked well for a couple of years, and we've been really pleased with it.
It cost less than $100 to set up, including all the cables, tackle box,and the adapters.
I'm not sure how Powerline adapters would work in an apartment building, especially an older one. They also tend to work better with newer wiring. Otherwise I would have suggested it to you.
tnspr -
You beat me to it! Thanks...
I was going to ask you.
Carolyn always has the greatest ideas and the execution is usually above and beyond.
It's a pity that it isn't an option for me.....
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