The "connected home" may also be thought of as any building that may benefit from modern technology. Garages, barns, out-buildings and garden offices can also easily take advantage of the vast array of cost-saving and lifestyle enhancing solutions.
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With more and more of us working from home, many choose to do so from the privacy of an office in the garden. Sometimes, from a technology perspective, this poses initial challenges and is an area we frequently get asked to assist with.
Extending WiFi into the Garden Office.
Often people come to us saying that the WiFi range from their router just won't reach the office. They've tried relocating the home WiFi router to the windowsill nearest the garden, pointing it towards the outbuilding, but often find this still won't provide a stable wireless link to the external office. Or sometimes it suffers annoying wireless drop-outs, or even adversely affect the wireless coverage in the house.
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Here at HP Tech Services we have a number of options to solve this problem, but we do make assumptions that you do actually have power to the garden office! Our first recommendation is to try a very simple and cheap solution called a Home Plug. This is a system where you send the internet signal along the mains. For this to work successfully the outbuilding needs to be on the same mains supply as the home router. A simple Home Plug point-to-point link allowing WiFi in the home office will cost less than £60 and can be purchased from us via eBay.
If Home Plug is not a practical option, and there may be many reasons for that including mains interference, distance etc., then our second suggestion would be that you consider a WiFi "point-to-point" link from the home to the garden office. This means you have a dedicated WiFi link between your house and the office providing maximum data-throughput with no drop outs. At the office end, you're presented with an Ethernet connection which can be connected to a switch to provide connectivity for all the desktop PCs, printers etc and to a WiFi access point to provide WiFi for your iPad and laptop.
What exactly is a WiFi Point-to-Point link?
WiFi Point-to-Point links consists of a pair of outdoor WiFi access points that face each other. One of the external facia of the house, and one on the garden office. This link runs on a completely different frequency to that of the house Wi-Fi, so it doesn't cause any interference or affect the range in any way.
Is this self installable?
It is fairly easy to install but it may require a bit of drilling and will call for you terminating RJ45 connections. We can supply a full solution, together with detailed installation instructions, but you may prefer to take advantage of our full installation service. Please contact us for more details.
Should you prefer to self-install, one of the access points should be mounted on the outside of the main house and the other on the office building, the higher the better. The unit on the side of the house needs to be connected via an Ethernet cable to the WiFi router. For ease of installation you can always use Homeplugs to provide a physical Ethernet port where the cable enters the building rather than moving the router.
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At the office side, you have exactly the same setup. The other WiFi Point-to-Point link is mounted on the building and a single Ethernet cable runs from the unit into the office delivering your connectivity, only this time the wireless signal is now converted back to Ethernet, via a cable. This cable should be connected into a an access point to provide a local WiFi hot-spot in the office. Some WiFi access points have additional Ethernet ports so you can plug in other wired devices if you need to.
Free site-survey and consultation
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HP Tech Services offer a free site-survey and consultation within a 15 mile radius of our office. Please contact us for further details and to schedule our visit.