Hi all, looking for some guidance on getting wired networking upstairs to my pcs.
Currently I have my internet connection coming in downstairs. Without running cables upstairs is it possible to connect something to my existing wifi network and then break it out to to ethernet?
Any help much appreciated.
Others have already said EoP but I wanted to bring another option to the table. If your house had Coax run in the rooms either for an antenna or cable and its no longer in use, you can use a MOCA adapter, which transmits Ethernet over coax. This method doesn’t have the flaw that the EoP method does where your throughput gets killed if its on a different circuit.
If you do this be sure to either disconnect the coax going to the outside world if not in use or put a filter on the outside line so that you’re not feeding out to all your neighbors.
good call, I was under the understanding the unused line would be isolated/not external, but yea some companies get lazy and never disconnect and just turn the service off on their side. This wouldn’t be a problem with Antenna setups but a cable setup defo check that!
At least with my house, all the coax comes out to a central location outside where they connect to a splitter that then connects to the incoming feed from the cable company. If you don’t have cable or broadband internet, you can just disconnect the external feed to bypass this issue. Apart from initial installation or a service call, they’re unlikely to ever touch this again as they don’t need to physically come out to cut your service on their end even though your coax is still connected physically.
Ethernet over Power, not to be confused with Power over Ethernet, which are NOT the same thing.
I never had a satisfying experience with EOP but I finally discovered Ethernet over Coax. Since I installed them: reliable fast connections and no downtimes.
If you have coax plugs in the needed rooms, try that instead. (I went with bridges from Giga copper).
I have tried 3 brands of Ethernet over powerline, from 2013 through 2019, and they all broke down after about a year of continuous use. They start at 100Mb/s and gradually decreases to 100Kb/s.
In my use case I was unable to use powerline with 2 breaker panels, but MOCA over coaxial does work great.
Make sure it is a high speed rated one and past that good luck. It depends on what kind of wiring setup is hidden in your walls.
Wi-Fi might actually have higher peak speeds but even a repurposed/double duty wire setup like this is just so much more consistent assuming it works in the first place.
I have had good luck with a set I have that are gigabit rated (get about 280mbps in practice) across 4 different places I have lived however I temporarily pulled them so we could test at some friends apartments and one of them just didn’t work at all so be aware that could happen and just have to return them.
I’ve used both a DD-WRT wireless bridge and a wireline adapter and much prefer the wireline adapter. Data speeds are much higher without the potential for wifi issues and without the complexity of setting up a wireless bridge.
If you’ve got a spare router laying around; you can probably flash DDWRT, OpenWRT or similar to it, then use the wifi on it as a client-bridge. Does exactly what you asked for: connects to wifi and bridges the lan ports to that connection.
I used to do this at LAN parties almost 15 years ago. I know for sure DDWRT will do it.
And you can most likely still create a VAP on it to act as WiFi extender.
I’ve used one as a VPN client this way. Connect to WiFi network, connect to Mullvad using Wireguard, create virtual access point and it semi-practically worked.
Semi, the WRT160NL couldn’t really handle it. Especially after adding a separate guest network with another VAP. Crashing like every 3 minutes. It can realistically only act as either a WiFi client or single AP.But that is device-dependent. This is an old trash.
I’ve got a spare router lying around. I’ll give this a try.
Make sure to use a WDS bridge if supported, rather than some workaround DD-WRT offers, or putting everything behind yet another NAT and separate network.
WDS is what DDWRT uses for wifi client bridging. (it’s mentioned on the first page of the link i provided)
Except client bridge which is a sort of a workaround: https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Bridge
Ah, I see. It’s been a long time since I dove into this…
OP will probably want to use plain Client Mode then. Same thing, but a bit more stable and with an extra NAT.
Not really a big deal unless you need clients on the primary network to reach the services on secondary network. Then you’ve just gotta be aware of the extra NAT and the port forwarding required.
Don’t bother with ddwrt since it is really behind the curve.
OpenWRT is where its at but you need to proper hardware
After running DDWRT for years on my old router, I completely agree with this. The worst was googling tutorials to do something on the router and everything always referencing OpenWRT.
I’ve been failing at doing this for some weeks now.
I’ve been using openwrt for years so I thought this was going to be super straightforwad, but it seems like I can’t just bridge the wlan and the lan after the wlan is setup as a client.
Is there a guide of some sort for it?
I’m not familiar with OpenWRTs setup unfortunately.
DDWRT makes this super simple: select wifi mode ‘client bridge’, provide SSID+Auth. Lan is now bridged to wlan. No double NAT.
What does the topology look like?
I would use 802.11s for the back plane
Power line adaptor. I have them in my house and zero loss in speed/latency/dither. Your house electrics have to be ok though.
Does that work across breakers? I thought that was a major limitation.
Well my upstairs and downstairs are on different breakers but I am in UK.
From what I read at the time was that as long as the whole system is part of the same consumer unit then everything would be ok.
I have a pair to get from one side of the room to another then one in each of the bedrooms for my wife and myself with no detriment.
I suppose the sensible advice would be for everyone who is interested to give it a go. It has been running without issue for me for nearly two years now.
Maybe I’ll try it then. It would be a lot easier than running cable…
I use (a slightly different model of) this.
It functions as a wireless client of my primary AP. It provides a bridge, allowing my devices to pick up DHCP addresses from my primary router.
Yes, this. What you need is a Wifi bridge.
You can search for a device that specifically works as a Wifi bridge, or (as Rivalarrival suggested) you can buy one of the many multipurpose GL.iNet devices and configure it in bridge mode. I recommend GL.iNet devices because they run OpenWRT out of the box.
Make sure you run proper OpenWRT and not what ever GL.iNet is shipping
If I can’t get it going reusing stuff i already own I’ll look into something like this. Thank you.
It is entirely possible
However, it is very much not the recommended approach. The problem with a single connection to the WiFi is that you are limited in bandwidth and by the large amount of latency WiFi adds.
Instead, I would look into running a cable. It will take some doing but you can keep there for years and years.
Another way you could do it is with a Mesh. Get a bunch of OpenWRT devices and configure 802.11s
Yeah, running the cable is probably not as big a deal as it seems at first glance. The wall plates are easy, use a fish tape to pull the cable through where you need to.
They’re going to the second story so it might not be so simple if they need to drill down through into the lower floors wall cavity.
This is why I had the builders put in a chase from the basement to the attic, because I knew I would be running cables at some point.
If you don’t have one of those, you might be able to sneak through the framing next to something else that’s already there.
Another option is if you have coax installed for tv/cable, and aren’t using it, even just in the rooms you want to connect wires through, MoCA might work.
I use MoCA and I really like it. It does add 2-3ms of latency compared to pure ethernet, but it’s still better latency than Wi-Fi and much better throughput. I use it cause I’m renting and it means I can use the existing coax.
I second the suggestion to get some Wi-Fi mesh nodes and replace your current Wi-Fi router with that. Not only will you get the Ethernet ports you need, but everything will be on one big, strong, seamless network
I would go the more DIY approach which is using OpenWRT with a bunch of different hardware.
Makes sense but I bought a new router not long ago. Need the money for buying some storage for the nas I’m looking to setup.
Why? (Just out of my curiosity)
So I don’t have to install a wifi card or dongle in every old pc I’m stuffing around with.
Oh, yeah that makes sense, thanks
I have an Asus router in my basement, which is mesh capable. The best way to do that is to get another identical router as a node, which I’ve done. I have not tried doing this, but being a router it has ethernet ports. I would think they would do what you’re hoping.
What? It is true some all in one home network devices have network ports. I wouldn’t use them as a switch though since often they use the CPU for switching at a hardware level.
I would look into OpenWRT based mesh networks since that sounds like what you want.
My mesh Wi-Fi system allows me to connect Ethernet devices to the nodes which might be what you’re looking for.
