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DavidR8's shop shenanigans

And don't forget that today is Sunday with all the kids in your neighbourhood home from school! Try again tomorrow morning!
Sadly I don’t have the same speed in the shop. have one unit in a basement window about 25 feet from the shop and another unit in the shop on the wall nearest the basement window :(
IMG_1489.webp
 
Sadly I don’t have the same speed in the shop. have one unit in a basement window about 25 feet from the shop and another unit in the shop on the wall nearest the basement window :(

Well, at the risk of repeating myself...... I would die to have 50Mb. I don't get 1. What are doing that needs more than 50mb anyway?

Mesh units are not really meant for use in a detached garage. They are perfect for a whole multifloor home. If higher speeds in the shop was your aim, an extender or an Access Point might have been better.

You might try disconnecting the unit in the shop so you connect directly to the one in the basement window. Also try putting the shop unit back in the house some place close to the shop too. At the risk of over simplifying, meshes are meant to take advantage of echoes. That situation doesn't really exist between your shop and your house. A directional extender in the basement window might be even better.

Question - what are the house and shop walls made of? Plywood, drywall, vinyl siding, thin lumbar, and glass are pretty transparent to WiFi. But bricks, blocks, concrete, and metal siding are not.
 
Well, at the risk of repeating myself...... I would die to have 50Mb. I don't get 1. What are doing that needs more than 50mb anyway?

Mesh units are not really meant for use in a detached garage. They are perfect for a whole multifloor home. If higher speeds in the shop was your aim, an extender or an Access Point might have been better.

You might try disconnecting the unit in the shop so you connect directly to the one in the basement window. Also try putting the shop unit back in the house some place close to the shop too. At the risk of over simplifying, meshes are meant to take advantage of echoes. That situation doesn't really exist between your shop and your house. A directional extender in the basement window might be even better.

Question - what are the house and shop walls made of? Plywood, drywall, vinyl siding, thin lumbar, and glass are pretty transparent to WiFi. But bricks, blocks, concrete, and metal siding are not.
The house is stucco so I suspect the wire mesh is having a Faraday cage effect.
I’m going to order a powerline adapter instead.
 
An Access Point (AP) in the shop would be a good way to go, you'd still need to wire from the house into the shop. The AP's we put in are PoE so no need for a power outlet. One in the middle of the shop would get to all the corners and a bit into the yard/driveway.
 
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I’m going to order a powerline adapter instead

I've had good success with those. But I wasn't trying to beat 50M. WiFi is line of sight so the window is prolly pretty good. But if the shop is stucco too, that's a problem.

Before you buy a powerline unit, check the specs. 50M may well be too fast.

Frankly, I'd be thrilled with a 50M connection to my shop. There is NOTHING I would be doing out there that would require more. Perhaps backing up a laptop might be the exception but that could be done over the course of several days if necessary - or I could take it to the house.
 
An Access Point (AP) in the shop would be a good way to go, you'd still need to wire from the house into the shop. The AP's we put in are PoE so need for a power outlet. One in the middle of the shop would get to all the corners and a bit into the yard/driveway.
What’s a PoE?
Edit: ahh Power over Internet Ethernet
 
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Or more precisely not all of the wires in an Ethernet cable are used. The spares can supply up to 56V so you might have an out door camera that talks over Ethernet but also needs power of course.

So you have:
Camera <--> Ethernet cable with power <--> PoE adaptor goes to wall plug to get 56V and has another Ethernet connection to go to your router.

There's also power line PoE. My Logitech cameras used this. Unit plugs into wall to get AC power and sends it up Ethernet cable to camera. Network messages are modulated onto the power line and near the router or switch another power line module grabs that Ethernet messaging and sends it into the router onto your local network.

One of my Logitech power supply units failed. I replaced it with a PoE device and then ran cable to it.

1723421213286.webp

Where the PoE over power line is handy is when you can't get an ethernet cable out to somewhere but you have power line. The problem is the various power line are not compatible and tend to interfere with each other.

Back in 2000 I worked for a UK company called nSine. It died when the tech bubble crashed but we did have MP4 video playing over power line and at the same time lamp/switch controls. The biggest problem was the American Companies didn't want to play ball and come up with a single Carrier that could handle different companies encrypted data and each company tended to destroy the other's data stream.

The other problem, more serious too was that power line only really handles RF frequencies from 3 to 30 MHz. And that pops it right on top of the 10MHz HAM radio band. So to follow world wide regulations signal power levels weren't allowed above a certain noise limit. Which meant PC power supplies and other switching power supplies that injected noise onto the power line also interfered with the signal. The company tried hard to get the regulations changed so that equipment plugged in had to not emit higher than one level but power line communications could emit at a higher level but still low enough so a house didn't become a giant interference source for radio communications.

Ultimately WiFi and ZigBee and BlueTooth became the go to solution.
 
Of course PoE also requires you to have a switch that provides the power. Both AP's and camera's are PoE, not needing a 120v outlet nearby certainly makes placement easier.
 
Or more precisely not all of the wires in an Ethernet cable are used. The spares can supply up to 56V so you might have an out door camera that talks over Ethernet but also needs power of course.

So you have:
Camera <--> Ethernet cable with power <--> PoE adaptor goes to wall plug to get 56V and has another Ethernet connection to go to your router.

There's also power line PoE. My Logitech cameras used this. Unit plugs into wall to get AC power and sends it up Ethernet cable to camera. Network messages are modulated onto the power line and near the router or switch another power line module grabs that Ethernet messaging and sends it into the router onto your local network.

One of my Logitech power supply units failed. I replaced it with a PoE device and then ran cable to it.

View attachment 50637

Where the PoE over power line is handy is when you can't get an ethernet cable out to somewhere but you have power line. The problem is the various power line are not compatible and tend to interfere with each other.

Back in 2000 I worked for a UK company called nSine. It died when the tech bubble crashed but we did have MP4 video playing over power line and at the same time lamp/switch controls. The biggest problem was the American Companies didn't want to play ball and come up with a single Carrier that could handle different companies encrypted data and each company tended to destroy the other's data stream.

The other problem, more serious too was that power line only really handles RF frequencies from 3 to 30 MHz. And that pops it right on top of the 10MHz HAM radio band. So to follow world wide regulations signal power levels weren't allowed above a certain noise limit. Which meant PC power supplies and other switching power supplies that injected noise onto the power line also interfered with the signal. The company tried hard to get the regulations changed so that equipment plugged in had to not emit higher than one level but power line communications could emit at a higher level but still low enough so a house didn't become a giant interference source for radio communications.

Ultimately WiFi and ZigBee and BlueTooth became the go to solution.
That's a picture of a power injector. Power injectors are used when the Ethernet Switch (which could be built into a router etc.) does not provide native PoE on its ports. The pins used to provide power vary based on the supported speed. On standard RJ45 copper cabling, at lower speed Ethernet connections (10/100), only 2 of the 4 pairs are used for data transmission and the unused pairs can be used to supply power. Starting with Gigabit Ethernet, the encoding logic becomes more complex and all 4 pairs are used to signal - which is how it achieves the nominal 10x speed improvement while using the same cabling. In this case, the power is provided by biasing the signal voltage by the power voltage - usually 48v. The idea of Ethernet over power works in a similar way, but because electrical wiring is not point-to-point, it is much more like the ancient coax Ethernet and interference is a significant problem - including from your neighbor who might be using the same thing in their power sockets

There is a ton more detail.

The 'speed' of an Internet connection is very hard to quantify. It can never be faster than the line rate of the slowest link between the client device (phone, laptop, PC etc.) and the server, but in all but contrived test cases, the apparent speed will be less - any usually _much_ less than the slowest line rate. Internet traffic (IPv4 or IPv6) is all packet switched (unlike the circuit switched PSTN) and relies on layers of protocols. Layer 1 is physical and may be RJ45 copper, Fibre, radio etc. Layer 2 is a line protocol like Ethernet or LTE - of something exotic like FDDI. Layer 3 is where hosts on a network become addressable - IPv4 or IPv6 for all modern purposes. Layer 4 is where it starts to get interesting from a performance point of view. This is where a network ceases to be just a way of sending bits around, and implements protocols that can provide useful services. The most common protocol by far is TCP. UDP is also a very important protocol and there are many others. This is also the layer at which VPNs are implemented. Layers 5,6,7 are defined in the OSI model, but are rarely standardized between protocols / applications / network devices.

When it comes to Internet speed, the most common type of traffic is HTTP traffic - web browsing. The secure version is called HTTPS and uses SSL / TLS, and that adds processing load to encrypt / decrypt the data, but works the same way from a network performance point of view. HTTP 1.0, 1.1 & 2.0 use only TCP. HTTP 3.0 uses a TCP control channel and UDP data channels. The details are unimportant here, but TCP suffers from a well known problem called the bandwidth delay product that _always_ artificially reduces the amount of information that can be sent over a network. Essentially TCP was designed to allow higher level protocols that expected a dedicated circuit to be readily switched to a packet switched network, and it includes flow control and retransmission so that no data is lost. But that requires feedback from the receiver before the sender can continue, and if the network path has a high latency, the need for that feedback prevents the full capacity of the network from being used. This means that Internet speed tests and real world apparent speed browsing websites etc. differ dramatically even on the best networks, and the poorer the network quality the larger divergence.

As this is very much off topic for this forum, I'll stop here. If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll continue
 
Back to my question @DavidR8. What are you doing in your shop that makes you think you need more than 50Mb out there? I would die to have an order of magnitude less.

There are very few tasks that benefit from more.
 
Back to my question @DavidR8. What are you doing in your shop that makes you think you need more than 50Mb out there? I would die to have an order of magnitude less.

There are very few tasks that benefit from more.
I’m just spoiled by our hyper fast cable service in the house. If I can get 50Mb service reliably in the shop I’d be thrilled. It’s mostly for the times when I need to watch a video on how to do some obscure CNC thing or the like. And if I could have my work office in the shop that would be grand. That requires a strong fast connection as I’m on video conferences all day long.
 
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I’m just spoiled by our hyper fast cable service in the house. If I can get 50Mb service reliably in the shop I’d be thrilled. It’s mostly for the times when I need to watch a video on how to do some obscure CNC thing or the like. And if I could have my work office in the shop that would be grand. That requires a strong fast connection as I’m on video conferences all day long.

50M will do all that easily with lots left over and leave me very very jealous.

Heck, you could even put 6 of @jcdammeyer's 4k videos on at once on different screens.

I don't know about the high-speed 3D Solids stress simulation of the table saw running off a super computer in California in real time though.......
 
I’m just spoiled by our hyper fast cable service in the house. If I can get 50Mb service reliably in the shop I’d be thrilled. It’s mostly for the times when I need to watch a video on how to do some obscure CNC thing or the like. And if I could have my work office in the shop that would be grand. That requires a strong fast connection as I’m on video conferences all day long.
Hmmm. CNC means??? Oh I know. Carnal Nympho Call
 
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