My partner lives a couple doors down from me in the same apartment building and we’ve been sharing their internet for a while.
It’s an older building with pretty thick concrete walls, so I know this isn’t exactly an ideal WiFi setup. The weird part is that it works well enough in my living room. Streaming is fine, my phone doesn’t really complain, etc. But my desk is in the back room and my laptop connection there is all over the place. Video calls freeze, pages randomly take forever to load, and sometimes I have to move closer to the entrance just to get things working again.
I can’t move their router, and I’d rather not pay for a second internet connection if there’s a cheaper way around this. Would putting a WiFi booster somewhere in my apartment help, or am I just going to be repeating a bad signal?
Before buying a booster, I’d check where the signal is actually usable. You could use NetSpot on your laptop to compare the signal near your entrance, in the living room, and at your desk. I’d also look at the channel situation, especially if there are a lot of other apartments around you. If you’ve got a decent connection near the entrance but it falls off farther inside, that might give you a workable spot for a wireless node. If it’s already poor everywhere, buying a repeater probably won’t accomplish much.
@Major_Peter So the idea would be to put it somewhere that still gets a good signal from their router, rather than in the room where I need WiFi?
@LKV_11.11.98 Exactly. The node needs a decent connection back to the main router first.
If you can get a cable between the apartments, that would be the cleanest solution.
A booster isn’t going to punch through concrete any better just because it has more antennas.
Honestly, if you work from home and depend on video calls, I’d at least price out your own connection.