2 Airport Basestations In 1 House?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Is it possible to have two basesations in one hoise, with one Cable account? My PowerBook cannot even get 10 feet away from the basestation without it loosing signal!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    Something is wrong here. PowerBooks are notorious for bad wireless reception, but if you really have a max range of 10-feet, perhaps your antenna connection has come loose?



    What model PowerBook do you have? I have a 800Mhz PowerBook DV, and can get a strong signal from anywhere in our (admittedly small) house.



    Before you buy a new base station, you might want to try using a third-party 802.11b card with an external antenna in your PowerBook's card slot. I have successfully tried both a Cisco Aironet and Farallon (now Proxim) Skyline card.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    trevormtrevorm Posts: 841member
    I once thought about putting a second one in my house.



    I have a Tibook 800Mhz and found it no longer picks up reception in rooms it used to and now gets it where it never got it before, and the base station hasnt been moved. It drives me mad!





    Does the weather affect transmission perhaps? Cold v Hot etc????
  • Reply 3 of 10
    jaredjared Posts: 639member
    trevorM I feel your pain. I have a Ti800 too. I do not want to get an external card because that kind defeats the purpose of having an internal one.



    Maybe I will take it down to the Apple Store and see if a Genius could see if there is anything wrong with it.



    But can anyone answer the question?
  • Reply 4 of 10
    You can have two basestations... I don't know if the Apple basestations themselves will actually support bridging; That is I don't think the apple basestations are intelligent enough to hand you off to another basestation when you need to be.



    So if you are on BS 1, and you walk out of its range and into the range of BS2, I don't think you automagically get switched over. This is how modern cellular networks operate.



    I think Jobs mentioned something about the Airport Extreme basestations doing that though...
  • Reply 5 of 10
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    [quote]Originally posted by M3D Jack:

    <strong>You can have two basestations... I don't know if the Apple basestations themselves will actually support bridging; That is I don't think the apple basestations are intelligent enough to hand you off to another basestation when you need to be.



    So if you are on BS 1, and you walk out of its range and into the range of BS2, I don't think you automagically get switched over. This is how modern cellular networks operate.



    I think Jobs mentioned something about the Airport Extreme basestations doing that though...</strong><hr></blockquote>



    Exactly: the older (i.e. all pre-extreme basestations) do not incorporate bridging.



    I think a possibility would be some kind of device that picks up the signal, strengthens it and retransmits it. These will inevitably be third-party, but seeing 802.11b is an industry standard if there ever was one, there shouldn't be any problems. Now, as to how these things are called, I don't know. 'Access points' perhaps? Could some more knowledgeable networker step up please?
  • Reply 6 of 10
    Hi



    If you got only 10 feet, try changing the channel setting.



    Or perhaps you are using one of these wireless audio/video senders/receivers. These thing will limit your airport range dramatically.



    And if you thinking about buying another BS (base station :-) ), i would consider 3com's they support bridging, and for the price of apple bs you'll get 2 of these (well, almost)



    Access point is just another name for BS,



    You can get 'repeater bridge access point' like the one made by buffalo (WLA-AWCG) it will allow for bridging access points without that feature (up to 6 access points can be bridged), and it has a range up to 3km, but it's $500 CAD, so....



    HTH



    [ 01-23-2003: Message edited by: piwozniak ]</p>
  • Reply 7 of 10
    $500 Canadian? That makes it practically free here ;-)



    I'd go with what he said though... if you're only getting 10 feet, look into anything else that might be iterfering with the airport signal.



    Also, Netgear, as well as other companies, make 802.11b/100Base-T routers/switch combos. Last time dealmac.com mentioned the Netgear, it was $60. Which isn't bad seeing as how it does more than the Apple base station and costs a heck of a lot less.
  • Reply 8 of 10
    elricelric Posts: 230member
    OK airport operates at 2.4 ghz and so dose my phone, would it be possible for them to interfere with each other? (The phone chooses a different channel each time it is used)
  • Reply 9 of 10
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    Possible, yes. However the phone and Wireless basestations do not use the entire range of the 2.4Ghz spectrum. It is broken up into the 11 different 802.11 channels, and then some for
  • Reply 10 of 10
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    The new basestations can be wirelessly daisy chained up to 4 links deep, though I bet latency is pretty bad even if you are 2 links down.



    The old basestations can be used as bridges if they are both connected on the same subnet, so they have to be wired...useless to most of us without wired homes. I once pieced together a shoddy hack of a solution which placed an iMac just within range of my basestation. I then connected a second basestation to that iMac and used the internet sharing feature in OS X to provide sharing through that basestation (used as a transparent bridge withouth NAT or DHCP.)
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