Problem with Netgear DG834N router and associated PCI card

Hi there,

I live in Greece, in a 2 bed house, and have been plagued by poor signal problems in my house. The house is on 1 level, but the distinctive factor is that I have pretty thick concrete walls. I used to live in London, and with paper thin walls I never had these kinds of signal issues. Now however, I am struggling.

I had a speedtouch router from my ISP, but that could not get from the lounge to my bedroom, a mere 10m distance, so I upgraded to the latest and greatest Netgear DG834N - I also bought the associated PCI card with the attached bulky antenna, thinking this would solve the problem. Boy was I wrong!

I get signal, but at a measly 13mbps, and although it's fine mostly, I suffer from frequent disconnections, and if someone merely comes to sit by my desk and obstructs the antenna, I lose signal completely! I can't understand how such an expensive router and PCI card can suffer from these problems. As mentioned, the distance from lounge to bedroom is only roughly 10-15m. I think the main problem is that I have a bathroom with tiled walls in between the lounge and bedroom, so I am guessing the signal gets bounced around in there and can't escape out of the bathroom?

Can anyone suggest some practical way to fix this problem? I've forked out £150 on 2 pieces of kit to fix the signal issue, and it's only barely done the job, with frequent disconnections. I am contemplating packing the whole thing in and buying a seriously long network cable and running it along my wall from lounge to bedroom, but this is not ideal once I've spent £150 on a wireless set up.

Can anyone tell me:

- Are the Netgear powerline products any good? Would they work with my current setup - are they alright for gaming?

- If I get a long cat5 cable, would there be degradation because the cable is 15m?

Many thanks

As soon as I started reading your post I thought CONCRETE! then you mentioned it yourself! Firstly Concrete will Zap your signal strength regardless as you've found out! If you want to stay with wireless then I would probably try a MIMO router, MIMO stands for multi input, multi output. Basically the router has about 9 antenna inside and it constantly polls to see which antenna is getting the strongest signal and will change to this antenna, all this is done in milliseconds! This could help you out. But it means spending more money on new kit! Is there any possibility you could return the kit you have bought?

The powerline kits are a good idea but remember that the two plug sockets you will connect via need to be on the same ring main otherwise they wont work!

Other than that 15m of ethernet cable is absolutely fine. Cable beats Wifi everytime in terms of reliability, so if you can run a length of cable it will only cost you a couple of quid! then seel your router on ebay and go out for a pint or two or 10!!

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Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes, lots of concrete in my house, but I thought my router was MIMO? I thought the DG834N was at the pinnacle of performance in terms of routers...? Was I bamboozled? I think the cable has won, and I'll give up on wifi for now. thanks.

Nope. Wifi is just weak by regulation, and easily thwarted by obstacles, and we all hope for more than it actually delivers.

sorry didn't realise that was MIMO, yeah just stick with cable, wireless is great in certain environments but not all unfortunately!

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Thanks guys. Could you do me a favour and recommend another really high quality router wireless router? Signal signal signal is what I'm worried about. Nothing else really. All I really use other than that is port forwarding for obvious reasons. Any recommendations would help greatly, even though I think I will probably go with a wired connection.

I can run a cat 5 cable to a network hub in my office, and connect multiple machines to it right? Again, any recommendations on the hub would also help

Thanks v much.

If you still want to blast wifi signal through the concrete walls, then you might try making a reflector from metal screen, or foil on paperboard. Place it on the side of the router opposite the direction from which you're trying to connect the laptop. It should be larger than the router box, and can be flat, angled or parabolic, as long as the "signal bounce" focuses on the router's internal antennas.

With wireless-n, antenna orientation can be important, so you might get improved signal by rotating the DG834N.

Look up "parabolic reflector" on Google and get some ideas.