there are 3 townhouses, kind of like 6 normal size semi-detached houses i guess, so 6 houses total numbered 1-6

i'm looking to broadcast a wireless signal from upstairs in house no.2 to downstairs in house no.5

the distance is probably less than 30m but there's a full 2 houses inbetween

does anyone have any experience of anything like this? recommendations of long range routers/extender? would a netgear n600 do it? any other options?

hope this and the level of detail makes sense :s

I've tried this with one house in between and it didn't work. Since then I've discovered the wireless kit that is sold in this country is limited to prevent it causing too much interference with other houses. You're best bet is to try get something which you can put DDWRT on. This will give you options to increase the output of the wireless router (this is technically illegal and may also damage the router). You can then try use a directional antenna to boost the strength again which will prevent the rest of house 2 getting the signal from the router but might be enough to get it to house 6. Allegedly you can make one of these out of a pringles can if you like but you can also pick them up cheap on dealextreme.com. Also you may need to talk to the houses in between to find which wireless channels they are using and to avoid them as best as possible (they overlap so the further away numerically the better).

If all the houses were on the same power circuit you could try using a homeplug connection but that is probably unlikely to work.

Ultimately If you want this for anything other than basic internet access you'd be lucky to get anything usable from it though. Streaming or file sharing will probably never work at those distances without some major kit. Run a cat 5 cable across the roof is your best bet.

Asked a transmission engineer in here for the craic....

It would be a bit of a stretch to get this to work to be honest but not impossible. You could possibly do this using some of the following kit:
A range extender unit in house no. 5 with a high gain antenna mounted on the wall pointing towards house no. 2. Then on house 2 mount a 2nd high gain antenna (pointing at the other high gain antenna on no.5) & connect this to the router.
1. You'd have a couple of problems to overcome though:
The range extender & the router in original house would need to have 2 antenna ports each, one for the antenna outside & the other for the signal inside house.
Some routers can work in repeater mode (what a range extender does) so you might even have an old router lying around that would work.
2. You'd need to buy two 7dBi WiFi antennas, one for each end. Then find a way to mount them outside facing each other from the two houses.
3. The next issue would be cabling the antenna back to the router, it needs to be as short as possible using good quality RF cable.
4. As well as having to keep the cable run to the antenna a short distance, you would still need to plug in your DSL feed (phone line) at the first house. Just had a thought: You might be able to overcome this by having a range extender in both houses. However latency for gaming would be affected in no.5

stop being scabby in trying to share your broadband account with your brother

eircom can't give me broadband because the lines too poor and the 3g receptions too bad, so i'm kind of out of options :/

thanks toast and joycer

doesn't look like there's an easy solution anyway. i'm gonna look into those options though

i'd really want to avoid running cables between houses or having anything outside the house

here's a follow up question:

is there a company in ireland other than eircom that activate phonelines?

i think the problem when i ordered with eircom before might have been the agent thinking i wanted next gen broadband, but they then told me the line wouldn't take any broadband at all and told me to cancel my order

i'd like a second opinion though and if i want one from eircom now i have to pay for 12 months