This isn’t much of a problem at the 200 square foot Manhattan apartment that doubles as Gizmodo HQ, but Paul Boutin gives the lowdown on how to set up proper Wi-Fi coverage in an actual, full-sized American home:
The current crop of 802.11 gear (colloquially known as “Wi-Fi,” even when that’s not technically correct) can reach through a room or two, but many homeowners find it’s not enough to cover the entire house and yard. Wi-Fi uses a microwave radio signal to reach through walls, floors, and ceilings, just like a cordless phone. But these obstacles also dampen the signal just as they do with the phone. The advertised range for Wi-Fi is 150 feet indoors and 300 feet outdoors, but in real life it often fails to reach from the kitchen to the living room, or upstairs to the bedroom. Determined to exercise my inalienable right as an American to surf the Web from the swimming pool, I enlisted a Wi-Fi engineer who also owns a sprawling suburban home to make my system work. Our mission: Blanket the entire property with Wi-Fi, using only off-the-shelf consumer hardware and without running more cables. That meant setting up multiple Wi-Fi bases (“access points,” as they’re called) linked back to a single DSL line.
