Wireless Bridge?
 

I have a Shaw SMCD3GN Docsis 3 modem/wireless router on the upper floor of my house. I want to hard wire my basement office and "theater" and use a wireless connection to reach the modem on the upper floor. The wireless access in the basement sucks with the SMC, and running a wire through the main floor to the upper floor is not an option.

So, I can disable the router portion of the SMC and plug in a router upstairs? Recommendations on the hardware to use for a bridge in the basement? Should I be looking at new 802.11ac hardware?

I'd look at powerline, but in my experience it's just not fast enough.

Internet over the electric wires in your house. Linus uses this at his own house.
twice the speed of wireless and more reliable he says.

have you tried the trendnet 500mbit adapters?

What about UV rated cat5/6 on the outside of the house?

I have 24 inch or so flexbit augers as well.....

Knowing how well wireless has worked for me I certainly wouldn't want the main connection to the modem to be wireless.

Wireless N has dropped out on me to a room 20 feet from the router and the router has been upgraded with higher gain antennas, etc. I had to go powerline to fix that problem.

Linus Linus vidio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4d5es8YYGo

I haven't found powerline to be faster then wireless N. Hell right now with my tablet or smart phone connected wirelessly to my router which is only a foot or two away I'm only at 65Mbps, whereas with powerline networks I've tested before I was running at near 500Mbps (on the 500Mbps powerline)

I've had bad experience with D-link's powerline speeds the 2 times I tried it for friends. It was probably crappy wiring in the additions. I'll do some more research, and look into the Trendnet stuff. My home has 2 electrical panels, the upstairs is on one and the main and basement on the other, so I'll have to check if it will work.

And thanks for the offer to drill holes in my brand new house. I'll keep the 5 year envelope warranty though. :biggrin:

Edit: Nope, powerline only works on the same breaker box. Because I have different panels for the different floors, it's no good. TRENDnet | Support| KnowledgeBase | TPL-407E | I’m not getting a connection through the TPL-407E/E2K. What should I do?
Back to my original suggestion. Wireless bridge.

MIMO wireless N with the directional wireless tech (that .11ac has) could work too, for a cheaper price. External, larger antennae might help as well.

You can plug in a router behind the modem right into a LAN port. I usually grab another IP address from it though, not DHCP.

Yea powerline would definitely not work if you have 2 seperate circuits going on there. Wireless bridge is going to be pretty slow too, but if that's all you have for options then maybe just pick up a couple of WRT54's and run DD-WRT or similar and bridge them. Should be able to find some for cheap. Hopefully there isn't much interference between the basement and top floor. But I mean if you have bad reception in the basement now, how is the bridge going to be any different. You might want to try using a different wireless router first other than the SMC, as the SMC modems from Shaw aren't too great for wireless to begin with. I'd start there.

There are better and/or directional antennas in the bridging routers than there are in the USB N adapter, phones, Wii, PS3, etcetera. Plus I have a Blueray with wired connection only I'd like to hook up. I should be able to get a solid link at 5 Ghz between floors with less interference than the 2.4 Ghz connection the SMC has.

Although I should probably just get a better router first that has bridging capability, then see if I can get it to link to the SMC before buying another one.

Do you have forced air heating / cooling? If so, use one of the risers to the second floor from the basement to route a CAT6 cable. I did that in my last house, worked fine. It was easy too since the basement was not finished, and had easy access to the ducting.