"Charlie Pridham" wrote in message
...
I have a problem with wireless devices in the house due to extremely thick
stone walls, knowing this I laid a cable through to the kitchen when doing
work on that recently to give us broadband access in there and that works
fine if we use an Ethernet cable to connect.

Question; is there anything I can plug into that Ethernet switch box which
would give me a wireless signal at that end?

I can't use the gizmos that plug in at either end and use the house wiring
as the kitchen has a differrent circuit and indeed fuse box to the rest of
the house.

I know there would be dedicated groups out there but I have learnt to
trust some of the posters here (and I may not understand the answer on a
more techy site!)


I've tried reading through the thread but lost the will to live.

Firstly, you have done exactly the right thing.
Wired is ALWAYS better than the alternatives, which are generally intended
to avoid all the mess of running wires.

What you want to do now can be summed up (hopefully) very simply.
Although this may require several read throughs :-)

Firstly, an essential digression.
Virtually all home Internet connections utilise a Name and Address
Translation (NAT) router.
On the Internet (Wide Area Network [WAN]) side you have a single IP address
from your provider.
On the internal (Local Area Network [LAN]) side you have as many IP
addresses as you have connected devices.
A DHCP server gives any device (PC, phone, tablet etc.) which asks its own
IP address.
It then combines all the traffic from all these devices and sends them out
to the Internet pretending that they are all coming from one device with the
WAN IP address.

So your entire house looks to the Internet as if it is one very busy
computer.

So in your kitchen you have an Ethernet cable which connects to a single
port on your NAT router in the office.
So a single PC (or whatever) can get an IP address via DHCP on you LAN and
can talk to all the other devices in your house plus talk to the Internet.

Now you want more than one device in the kitchen area.


You have several options.

(1) Connect an Ethernet switch (which is invisible to the network and does
not have an IP address) to the wire, and have a number of wired connections
in the kitchen. This is a bit like having a distribution board off a single
13 Amp socket with a number of items plugged in. Your devices connect
through to your NAT router in the office and ask it for IP addresses.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-Unma...tp_s2_edpp_url

(2) Do the wireless equivalent of (1) which is an Access Point (AP) - this
is basically invisible to the network (apart from management) and will allow
a number of wireless devices to connect through to your NAT router in the
office and ask it for IP addresses via DHCP.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-W...5509591&sr=8-2
This keeps all your devices on the same logical network which is nice if
they want to talk to each other.

(3) One really neat thing is that you can cascade NAT routers. So you can
install a wireless router in your kitchen. This will get a single IP address
from the NAT router in your office. It will then have one (WAN) IP address
from the office and then start sharing out a load of IP addresses (from a
different IP range) from its own DHCP server.
This is cool because the Internet thinks the office router is one big,
smart, but slightly confused PC.
The office router thinks the kitchen router is one medium sized, quite
clever but still slightly confused PC.
:-)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-W...5509735&sr=1-1
The downside of this is that (unless you do some fancy configuration) you
can't see the PCs in the office because they are on a different network.
The upside of this is increased security - the bad people have to get
through two NAT routers to harm you.

Virtually all consumer network devices these days are simple to use (usually
you just plug them in and they work) because most people don't know enough
to do anything much to configure them.

So a lot of words to say that it is all pretty easy and straightforward to
do.

Hope this helps.

Dave R

--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

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