FAQ

Wireless in your house

How far does the signal reach in my home?

We will provide you with a wireless router. Like all other wifi equipment here in the UK, it is restricted in terms of signal output to around 22dB. This means that it will be no more or less powerful than any other wifi device.

You should think carefully about where you wish to place your router. We normally recommend that it’s near the TV, so that your TV, Playstation, Sonos, etc. can all plug in directly. This does mean, depending on your house layout, that the signal does not cover every room. Older houses with 1m-thick walls are particularly difficult to get wifi signal through.

Remember — we can only support the router within your home; we cannot support all the other computer, video or hi-fi equipment in your home.

Can you recommend range extenders?

We are constrained by UK law to provide devices that transmit less than 25dB (or 1 watt) of wifi power. Of course in our traditional Scottish homes with thick internal walls, this sometimes leaves us with dead spots.

There are a number of solutions:

1. Expensive

Run more ethernet cables around your home from your central location, and hang wifi stations off these. It’s a pain to run additional cables, and dedicated wifi units are not cheap — but the upside is that this solution is very reliable. And of course running any form of additional cabling in your house is time consuming and messy.

Our installation company — Standard Security of Stonehaven — are very good at any sort of domestic or commercial cable installation. We’d recommend you contact them.

2. Homeplugs / range extenders

This is a system where you plug a number of adaptors in around the house. One is plugged into a socket beside our router (the wee white Mikrotik box we supplied), and a short cable is plugged into it. Then you can place one or more other adaptors into power sockets — each of these would then provide another wifi point.

There is a bewildering array of these available. We’ve tried various Netgear ones with limited success, but a local restaurant has been using devices from Solwise for a number of months, and recommends them. You start off with a pair — one plugs into the mains and the router, the other is a wifi point — and you can add more for additional remote wifi points. This should work on all mains cabling sharing a common electricity meter; in the summer months, you could put one in a garden shed to cover the garden. Be careful when you order additional units to check that they all work together.

We have to stress that we don’t use them personally, but we have a number of customers who are very happy with them.