Providing Wifi at building 100 ft away

[prdowty]

Using a Ubiquiti Wifi router in my home with signal strength maxed out (28 dBm). Have separate building about 100 ft away where Wifi is marginal and area beyond where Wifi is absent. There is unused coax (RG-59) run from house through conduit. I want to improve Wifi signal in separate building. Any advice on the following options would be greatly appreciated.

1) Look for Wifi router/access point with greater signal strength to deploy in my home.

2) Implement Moca over the RG-59 with total cable length 120-150 ft and put access point in separate building (never having done this would access point simply extend my existing Wifi network with same SSID?)

3) Yank out the RG-59 from the conduit and put in either Cat 6 or a Cat6/RG-6 combo. Put an access point in the separate building on the Cat6.

I like the idea of an access point wired to home router because I assume more robust and could expect good Wifi coverage with second access point. But I don't have experience with cabling in conduit and putting end connectors on bulk cabling.

I'm assuming the Moca over ~150ft of RG-59 is not a good idea.

I don't like the idea of a very powerful access point that is beyond my requirements (such as 10km range devices).

Thanks for any advice.

 

[EduCat]

We have two buildings that are networked together and use a wireless antenna bridge (direct) to go back and forth. Not sure if this is something you have considered, just throwing it out there. Kind of an expensive option though.

 

[JackMDS]

If there is clear line of sight you can Bridge with two Access Point installed on Windows that look one at the other.

Otherwise option 3.

 

[azazel1024]

Considering cost, you might as well just go with a pair of MoCA bridges and then place a router in AP mode in the building. You can get a couple of Actiontec ECB2500 for maybe $70 for the pair if you look around and should give you a pretty good 100Mbps connection between the buildings, supposing there aren't any serious Coax issues.

I would make sure that the RG-59 is connected to NOTHING else, other than the two MoCA bridges. That'll minimize signal loss.

RG-59 is roughly 20dB per 100ft of wiring. RG-6 is 6dB per 100ft of wiring for the frequency range you are looking at (MoCA is 900-1000MHz). That is a fairly large loss, call it 25-30dB, but it is by no means insurmountable. Just make ABSOLUTELY SURE that each end is plugged right in to the MoCA bridges and not connected to any other coax in the structures.

Afterall, look at what most house coax "networks" have to live with. You have dozens to a couple of hundred feet of Coax, which attenuates the entire signal, not just the shortest path from where the Coax comes in to the end device. You also have lots of splitters, which each degrade the signal. Then you have uncapped coax end points, which also degrade the signal.

I obviously can't promise a thing, but I'd think that MoCA should be able to deal with 30dB of total signal loss okay.

 

[Silenus]

For me hands down the best option would be just use the RJ-59 as pull cable for a new Cat6 line (or 2). Every other option seems inferior, especially since you already have a Ubiquiti access point. Adding a second Unifi AP in the remote building would make for a a nice seamless expansion of your existing network. No bridging, extending or anything else. It's really not hard to put a few connectors on some Cat 6.

Then again I already have the stuff I would need to do that wiring so it's no brainer for me.

 

[azazel1024]

The issue is if it can't be done as a clean pull. 100+ft through conduit is a pretty long distance, especially if there are ANY turns in the conduit, or if the conduit/wire isn't lubed already. If you do think of doing that, lube the Cat5e/6 that you attach to the RG-59 while you pull it out.

Get specific cable lube.

If that RG-59 breaks though, you are out of wired options. Unless you need "high speed" wireless there and are looking more for a good solid <100Mbps connection, I'd seriously look at a couple of MoCA bridges as it is very likely to work and work well.

 

[Berliner]

You most likely have already tried repositioning the antenna or have tried another one on a window? The easiest solution might be a (additional) directional antenna.

Not sure what kind of speeds are possible over that length of coax, but when I still used it, it was 10 Mbit/s.

 

[Lat]

Ethernet over Coax is quite frequently used for retrofit of analogue CCTV cameras to IP cameras...most adapters support well over 300ft and easily support 100BaseT. 120-150ft is considered a fairly short distance.

Like you suggested in (2), all you'd need to do is to add a second access point with the same SSID and WPA2 key and it'd connect in the other building the same way, as just an extension of your home network.

Example:
http://www.veracityusa.com/products/highwire/hwdatasheet.pdf


Probably less expensive than pulling new CAT6...