this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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I'm not even sure that would be a bad solution for us. Can something like a Raspberry Pi work as a hotspot?
I wonder what exactly it is that's messing with the signal.
My house was built in 1967. It's a solid house. The walls are plaster and they have chicken wire in them. WiFi is a nightmare. I ended up running a few hard lines and using a mesh system.
Same here, but the house is a few decades younger, has brick walls and thick reinforced concrete floors. Early WiFi was rough, let me tell ya. At one point, I improvised a directional WiFi antenna out of Styrofoam and precisely cut wires, which actually worked. I tried three generations of DLAN after that, all of which were horribly unreliable and had nowhere near the advertised performance. I'm now moderately happy with a meshnet, which is so reliable that I forgot how to log into it to configure it.
Any computer with a network port and a wifi adapter can be turned into a wifi access point.
But there are cheaper and better alternatives than a raspberry pi
That's probably true. Any examples off the top of your head? (I obviously haven't had to deal with this recently)
For mass distribution of wifi APs? Some SDN solution would have a higher upfront cost but a lower running cost. Im sure all the big providers have their own system, consumer ones include ubiquiti and omada.
Cheaper than that would be mikrotik. Not really deployable at the scale of 1000s that would be required to fit every room with a wifi AP, but CAPsMAN can scale to hundreds, so still has centralised management to reduce running costs.
If it has to be cheaper still, then any cheapo SBC with wifi. While raspberry pis might fit the bill, they would be too overpowered with too many unused features to really squeeze the cost effectiveness.
Hey, its google. They could probably fork an AP into one of their home automation thingies. Then probably a whole stack of ansible scripts to try and manage 1000s of deployed linux installs
Okay, so I wasn't quite as far off as I thought, then. Thanks.