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I'm trying to set up a wireless network in an old building with very thick walls. The 80Mbps VDSL2 connection arrives in possibly the worst place in the building - a router placed within a sensible cable's reach from the phone socket will still leave at least 3-4 feet of solid stone wall between it and most of the client devices. I've been experimenting with Powerline to extend the network into other parts of the building but this is proving unreliable and some older devices have difficulty switching between the two wireless networks.

I have been thinking of relocating the router to a more central location and installing a basic modem next to the incoming VDSL2 line and running a gigabit ethernet cable to the router's WAN port to distribute it, but I'm getting out of my networking comfort zone and don't have much time or budget to experiment much. Would this be a good solution, and if so, are there any particular features I should look for in a modem? I'm in the UK.

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You're fighting physics here, and you're not going to win. Various regulatory bodies limit the Tx power of wifi gear, so there's not a whole lot of room for improvement there. Remember that RF power drops off according to the Inverse-Square Law, so even if you were able to double the Tx power of your AP, it's going to make very, very little difference in the RF as received by your clients. And that's ignoring the fact that it's going through stone, not clear air.

All of that aside, you need to remember that even if you can get signal to your clients, your clients' signal still needs to get back to your access point, which will be much more problematic of a problem to solve than we cover in the first paragraph. If you only had a single client, you could install some directional, high-gain antennas to solve the problem, but that doesn't scale beyond a very small number of clients sharing a very small physical space.

So, what's the answer? Install cabling. You've tried power-line networking, and have found out what nearly everyone else does: it's a nice toy, but is horribly unreliable. You're just going to need to bite the bullet and install cabling from room to room.

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  • Yes, I'm well aware of how wireless signals propagate, hence why I want to move the wireless access point to a better location where there will only be max 1 wall/floor between it an any device in the building. My problem then will be how to get the internet connection (which arrives at the far corner of the building) to the access point.
    – MorayM
    Oct 11, 2016 at 8:24
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    ...which I answered. Install cable.
    – EEAA
    Oct 11, 2016 at 8:25

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