Fast, reliable Wifi in your shop.

Network access to my shop has been a bit of pain since doing the shop renovation. I tried a simple wifi extender, powerline (LAN over house wiring) and recently the Netgear EX7000 wifi extender (on sale at Best Buy right now for $129 CAD). The EX7000 was the best performing of those efforts, but in my shop, about 50 ft from our house, the speed was only about 8 Mbps. Aside from streaming Spotify to the 5.1 audio system in the shop, I'd also like to install a bit of automation and added security...so some more speed was needed.

The shop in it's initial chaos state had no need for wifi.


Cleaned up, and with a 5.1 audio setup, it was time to take things up a notch. Note the disco light in the middle of the ceiling. My kids love to sequester their friends in the shop, turn off the lights, fire up the disco ball, and crank the tunes.


If you're eyes glaze over when reading networking tech, stop reading now Otherwise, there's a few things to think about if you'd like fast internet/LAN access in your shop.

Going back about 14 yrs, I had run a gas line to the shop and at the same time buried 1" waterline with 2 x CAT5 cables run through it. These have been left completely exposed to weather, coiled up at each end. A quick test of both lines last night (using my LAN analyser) showed surprisingly that they were both just fine. It was time to drill a few holes, including through my basement concrete walls, and sort out proper LAN connections to the shop. My 7 yr old daughter got a quick training session on using a LAN cable tester and was a great help fishing/pulling LAN cable through the basement ceiling, and testing the runs once terminated.

As usual I learned a few things, and sorted out at least one existing LAN wiring problem in my home network which turned up during testing. In terms of the speeds you see here, keep in mind that a CAT5 LAN cable plugged into a Gigabit ethernet switch is good for a maximum of 125MB/s, or 1000 Mbps. Previous to today's testing, I've never seen more than 120 Mbps from a WIFI connection...so finally some significant speed advancements from newer 802.11AC wifi tech. Surprisingly, my iPhone 6 plus has 802.11AC capabilities and showed very impressive performance when connected via WIFI to the Netgear EX7000 extender/access point.

First of all, there are a few iOS and Android apps that are very useful if you're trying to tune up your wifi network. Ookla's "Speedtest" is handy for quick tests of your internet speed. To test how fast your wifi access is to your local network (LAN) "Wifi Sweetspots" is very handy. You can use this app to tune up an existing wifi installation by testing speeds as you re-orient external antennas, and/or reposition your WIFI router or access point. I found a surprising difference can be made in weak spots in a house or shop by getting a helper (my 12 yr old was happy to help today) by just rotating the WIFI access point or router 90 degrees, and reorientation of the external antennas. If you have an Android device, Netgear's Wifi Analytics is free, and puts the iOS apps to shame. It will let you tune up your access point location, adjust channels and examine surrounding Wifi signals to avoid interference. It's excellent.

The pleasant surprise is that 802.11 AC wifi combined with the iphone 6 plus means I can finally play 1080p files from my NAS directly on the phone over WIFI. My kids will be happy.

Finally, proper LAN connections in the shop!


The old Wifi access point.


The new EX7000 extender/access point.


Speedtest is good for testing max internet speed. You may want to run this from a wired PC/MAC to set your baseline. Note that my old wifi router 802.11G speeds were a bit slower than the house internet connection itself.


Netgear's Wifi Analytics on Android = awesome!




"Wifi Sweetspots" on iOS makes wifi speed testing easy. If you have an older router or access point, you may want to replace it.


The new EX7000 is twice as fast over plain old 802.11G


Wireless N speeds were similar on both access points...much faster than G.


This result shows how much faster again 802.11 AC is. I'll be adding another EX7000 in the shop.


Hope that all makes sense

Wow, what an improvement on the shop! It is certainly looking great!

Few questions/suggestions -

1. Why 5.1 seemingly for just music? I would go 2.1 with four bookshelf or full range speakers at ear level, and a sub.

2. Your shop looks like one small (in the world of Wifi range, please don't take offense) room, why would you need more than one access point?

3. Having tried the different consumer access points, I wouldn't again. I would have gone with a single Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite, mounted in the soffit or on the ceiling. Would blend in real nice and work wonders. Even a UAP-AC-Pro would be less than the EX7000 and it's commercial grade. (The EX7000 may or may not eek by it a bit on the top end, not that it matters in the real world)

4. You are in an area with a lot of 2.4ghz interference, common for urban areas. You'll want to use 5ghz wherever it's available. Your test shows 2.4ghz so I'm just curious if you checked both and selected the proper channel for each.

5. The EX7000 is designed as a repeater, sounds like you are using it in the most efficient way as a cabled access point though, right?

ishiboo said:

Wow, what an improvement on the shop! It is certainly looking great!

Few questions/suggestions -

1. Why 5.1 seemingly for just music? I would go 2.1 with four bookshelf or full range speakers at ear level, and a sub.

2. Your shop looks like one small (in the world of Wifi range, please don't take offense) room, why would you need more than one access point?

3. Having tried the different consumer access points, I wouldn't again. I would have gone with a single Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite, mounted in the soffit or on the ceiling. Would blend in real nice and work wonders. Even a UAP-AC-Pro would be less than the EX7000 and it's commercial grade. (The EX7000 may or may not eek by it a bit on the top end, not that it matters in the real world)

4. You are in an area with a lot of 2.4ghz interference, common for urban areas. You'll want to use 5ghz wherever it's available. Your test shows 2.4ghz so I'm just curious if you checked both and selected the proper channel for each.

5. The EX7000 is designed as a repeater, sounds like you are using it in the most efficient way as a cabled access point though, right?

Click to expand...

Agree one 1, 2, 3 and 4. Consumer level AP's are pretty terrible. If you are going to get into AP's, spend the money once, and be done. A good quality router is all you would need, unless we are missing half the shop in your pictures. And even then....

EDIT: Hell of a transformation btw.

26 mb. You get a big. " you ****" I can barley get 8 mb in the house off hot spot.

ishiboo said:

Wow, what an improvement on the shop! It is certainly looking great!

Few questions/suggestions -

1. Why 5.1 seemingly for just music? I would go 2.1 with four bookshelf or full range speakers at ear level, and a sub.

2. Your shop looks like one small (in the world of Wifi range, please don't take offense) room, why would you need more than one access point?

3. Having tried the different consumer access points, I wouldn't again. I would have gone with a single Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite, mounted in the soffit or on the ceiling. Would blend in real nice and work wonders. Even a UAP-AC-Pro would be less than the EX7000 and it's commercial grade. (The EX7000 may or may not eek by it a bit on the top end, not that it matters in the real world)

4. You are in an area with a lot of 2.4ghz interference, common for urban areas. You'll want to use 5ghz wherever it's available. Your test shows 2.4ghz so I'm just curious if you checked both and selected the proper channel for each.

5. The EX7000 is designed as a repeater, sounds like you are using it in the most efficient way as a cabled access point though, right?

Click to expand...

Ishiboo, great questions and comments

1. 5.1 is because I had a system sitting in storage. It was "free". Turns out the vault ceiling and 5.1 makes for a very nice listening environment

2. The shop and house are about 60 feet apart, so my preference is to run wifi at lower power in both locations. I use a Pfsense router which runs a number of packages for remote access, packet inspection, filtering, proxy, filtering and reporting. An HP 24 port switch attaches to that...and when done two APs, one in the shop, one at home. I also have a 10G connected NAS in the mix which hosts the family media.

3. On the commercial side I really like the Engenius EAP600 ceiling mount which have an excellent feature set for business, and lots of power. They don't do 802.11 AC though..otherwise I'd use them. The EX7000 also has 5 Gigabit ethernet ports, so ideal for the shop which will host a few other wired devices.

4. Good eye! The Samsung tablet I was using for the wifi analytics only does 2.4 Ghz, so you don't see any 5Ghz traffic in that screen grab. That said, the 802.11AC spec is a lot smarter in terms of congestion, so is likely best left at "auto". For now, the 5Ghz band is going to have less traffic I expect. The old router's N performance in the shop is identical to the EX7000 N tests (from a laptop) in the house.

5. Correct, the final setup will be an EX7000 in the house, and one in the shop. Both will be cabled. The one in the house is at the media center so I make use of the Gigabit ethernet ports in it to connect the satellite, Bluray, and HTPC etc. to the network. The shop AP will also see use on the Gigabit ports.


Derek, I gave up on commercial and consumer routers a while ago as I wanted an all in one box to take care of multiple functions at both home/business. I built up two matching mini-itx systems (low power use) with SSD drives and 2GB RAM to handle router chores. Pfsense (based on BSD) has been great to manage multi-wan load balance, remote access, packet inspection (snort), proxy, web filtering and reporting. I also use it at the business to manage guest network access via isolated wifi. I built up a 10G server/NAS/network at work. There's an 8 part blog series on it here over at smallnetbuilder.com

Slice, yes, internet access speeds have increased a fair bit over the last few yrs. We're lucky as I still recall the pain of 56K dial up

Flippin' whiners......



That's on a good day, here recent;y got some new neighbors and they must be sucking up some bandwidth cuz I've been under 2mb a lot lately.

You're only as good to Ookla as your uplink. Lucky for the OP he's not on Windstream. We are and just got past a 4 day outage. Speed test is of little use here - gig is OK for the house, but the max we can get is 12mb down a 500K (K - really) up. Most times it's around 6mb/.5. Not a big deal - plenty for Netflicks and other things. We also share that with another house. No problems. I put a 2.4 AP in the shop because it was cheap/cheap. I can get all the music, YouTube, etc I need from that. I was going to replace the Netgear items with Ubiquity but didn't really see the need to spend that much. The commercial grade items I deploy at work run about $560 each, and I'm not spending that much to watch cat videos.

Chris, I had to laugh at the cat video thing. Normally I use the "retired" work stuff at home.

Connectivity is a big deal for home office and business so we have dual WAN (cable and DSL) to both spots. That said, outages have been rare..near zero over the last few yrs.

One of the goals I've never hit is a seamless way for the wife and kids to browse 8 yrs of family pics/vids on their tablets/phones. So 802.11AC may seem pretty useless if your internet access is slow. The big difference is streaming HD from your local network. We use a QNAP NAS, so using a free app like Qfile, any of the iPads or phones in the house can stream anything on the NAS, skipping the craziness of iTunes. With 802.11AC, playing raw HD files right off the NAS/PC works perfectly with zero transcoding complexity. First time ever.

tdkkart said:

Flippin' whiners......



That's on a good day, here recent;y got some new neighbors and they must be sucking up some bandwidth cuz I've been under 2mb a lot lately.

Click to expand...

I feel your pain. I am about a mile from one cable provider, and a mile from the other. I work from home 24/7. Up until Black Friday, this has been my Internet for the last 5 years:



Made a deal with a neighboring farm about 4000' away to have cable Internet installed at their location, and set up a wireless AC link from the top of their barn, to a 35' steel pole in my field. End result:



Certainly made my Black Friday!

There is also an issue with the cable to the antenna, it's not a ToughCable I put out but one to test... and it has a bad pair. Once that's replaced, there will be gigabit on both ends (it only connects at 100 now) so I might do a bit better than the low 90s for download

Denwood said:

Ishiboo, great questions and comments

1. 5.1 is because I had a system sitting in storage. It was "free". Turns out the vault ceiling and 5.1 makes for a very nice listening environment

2. The shop and house are about 60 feet apart, so my preference is to run wifi at lower power in both locations. I use a Pfsense router which runs a number of packages for remote access, packet inspection, filtering, proxy, filtering and reporting. An HP 24 port switch attaches to that...and when done two APs, one in the shop, one at home. I also have a 10G connected NAS in the mix which hosts the family media.

3. On the commercial side I really like the Engenius EAP600 ceiling mount which have an excellent feature set for business, and lots of power. They don't do 802.11 AC though..otherwise I'd use them. The EX7000 also has 5 Gigabit ethernet ports, so ideal for the shop which will host a few other wired devices.

4. Good eye! The Samsung tablet I was using for the wifi analytics only does 2.4 Ghz, so you don't see any 5Ghz traffic in that screen grab. That said, the 802.11AC spec is a lot smarter in terms of congestion, so is likely best left at "auto". For now, the 5Ghz band is going to have less traffic I expect. The old router's N performance in the shop is identical to the EX7000 N tests (from a laptop) in the house.

5. Correct, the final setup will be an EX7000 in the house, and one in the shop. Both will be cabled. The one in the house is at the media center so I make use of the Gigabit ethernet ports in it to connect the satellite, Bluray, and HTPC etc. to the network. The shop AP will also see use on the Gigabit ports.

Click to expand...

Ah, sorry... I thought you meant more than one AP in the shop alone.

pfsense is great. I used to have a dedicated FreeBSD machine for my router, then switched over to DD-WRT which has served me well since. I will probably switch back to a dedicated machine at some point, though for right now it has been 100% reliable and has all the features I need.

I would never recommend using "auto" on ANY AP. It's almost never great. As another user of the spectrum I appreciate you turning the power down and not puking that RF all over the rest of us

I have been fighting slow or inconsistent WiFi through out home and shop 50 ft away as well.
After three routers ( Linksys WRT54GL prior and Linksys EA6100 dual band the last one) dropping IP address at the printer, dropping face time, slow data rates, weak signals etc etc etc. I have cable model Docsys 3 supplied by the cable company wired get 100Mbs.

I switched to a TP-Link AC 1900 Archer C9, my problems are gone. Fast consistent, no drops, 5G and 2.4 .
I did do have a Linksys extender RE1000 but it really not needed I use now on old desk top to supply wired connection for a shop manual look up service.

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Show, the TP-link AC products have garnered great reviews. That's a fast connection. I'm doing the same thing in the shop..a mini-itx PC to stream audio and for us as a look up tool. My house is old, with drywall over plaster/lathe and brick. So one central AP in the house will work, but coverage to the shop is minimal. The EX7000 set up as an extender in the closest room to the garage (kitchen) worked with impressive performance as the EX7000 can use one radio as a back-link, and the other for client connections with no performance hit. Usually the hit is 50%.

Ish, no worries. Once I'm done setting things up and checking coverage, output will be reduced as low as will work. That was one of the goals of using two wired APs. Given what we don't know about long term RF exposure, I figure minimizing it is a good thing.

I find that the Ookla SpeedTest always shows higher results than a more 'real world' type test like testmynet uses

Click on the Manual Test Size Button - and select a 200 mb file to download and see what you get:
http://testmy.net/download

Sure...I'll try and post results. That will of course only test my WAN connection...not LAN. Unfortunately I can't do a file copy to my laptop as it's only wireless N. The iphone 6 plus is the fastest wifi device I have right now.

Even the old 802.11G Dlink I was using can max out the 26Mbps internet speeds I have. It's important to note that these tests are only using 1 device...but we have as many as 15 connected devices pulling on the WAN.

Over 802.11N to the laptop, I was seeing a solid 20MB/s on a large file transfer (600MB) which is faster than the 130Mb/s the app was showing. Our laptops back up over wifi, so any increase in speed there makes full image backups using Storagecraft a whole lot faster.

I can however try an HD file sync from NAS to iOS and see how that plays out.

So the EX7000 is on sale right now at Best Buy for $129 (CAD). I picked up a second unit and also got a partial refund for the first one

Git, pretty similar to Ookla. Because Ookla auto selects the fastest/closest test site, your results should reflect your max internet speed. For testing, this is good.

It's worth noting that I'm doing these tests within 10 ft of the APs. It's very easy to drop to 7Mbps on the 5 Ghz band by walking 25 ft away with a few walls in the way. 290 Mbps between iphone wifi and LAN is quite good. 36MB/s is excellent (and the highest I've ever seen to date from wifi) to stream HD from our NAS.

nice post. my kids been bitching for months her new room is slow. I have told her to read a book. I used that wifi sweetspot on my iphone6 and sitting right next to my router it looked like a mountain range from 1 to 15mb. used the speedtest app and its more what I expected to see.

I get a big difference when I test mine. This is on my garage/shop computer that is hard wired.

From 228 Mbps down to a more realistic 96 Mbps

Git said:

I get a big difference when I test mine. This is on my garage/shop computer that is hard wired.

From 228 Mbps down to a more realistic 96 Mbps

Click to expand...

holy Christmas 96meg?? i can only get 30 at the most around here and i thought that was pretty good.

Well, it's actually a 300 down and 20 up

Not bad for $65 monthly


This one is a little faster:

5g test my net results:

TiP Summary - Minimum :: 30.17 Mbps | Middle :: 55.17 Mbps | Maximum :: 66.58 Mbps

My son-in-law recommended the TP LInk after he did the research and purchase. He was in condo situation with a lot of WiFi activitity. It was not overly expensive.

Denwood said:

Chris, I had to laugh at the cat video thing. Normally I use the "retired" work stuff at home.

Connectivity is a big deal for home office and business so we have dual WAN (cable and DSL) to both spots. That said, outages have been rare..near zero over the last few yrs.

Click to expand...

Our retired stuff is Cisco that requires a very expensive controller and licenses that cost more than the APs and controller combined. Which is why they are heading for the scrap pile.

Too expensive to dual home here, and the cable company is whack-o in Small Town America. They use a Motorola Canopy system (wireless, proprietary frequency and nodes) mounted on the main water tower - but there are no local service people for it. So Windstream is it, and yes even the city was offline for the 4 days while Windstream continued to give multiple explanations for the problem and a continuous series of repair ETAs that came and went. And I did not receive a call when the system was repaired, even though I agreed to a call back on the unattended support line 4 times.

Then the big giant LOL - I get an ad in the mail from Windstream extolling the virtues of their Business Class service. "Business Class" starts at 3m (for the same price as the 12m we get already) and comes with a disclaimer that they will not guarantee the bandwidth or any service level.

I always thought of pfsense as an open source ASA. I wouldn't do Cisco wireless at home either. We aren't retiring ours just adding more, but we are a Cisco shop. I have setup a few aironets without a controller, didn't need a license for it either.

Chris, sounds frustrating :-(

Orange, pfsense has a paid offering where larger Corp environments would need it. I like it because it does everything in one box..and you can build it up in terms of hardware to whatever is required. It scales nicely to builds with 8 core server class processors...and you can add network interfaces both real and virtual to handle just about anything.

My setup does the following on a rather pedestrian mini-itx dual core Celeron box with four network ports, 2GB ram and 30GB SSD. They sit in passively cooled cases 8"x9"x2". You can boot from USB, load the distro, and apply a saved restore profile in about 5 minutes. So other than saving your configuration (about 10 seconds) any kind of hardware failure becomes a trivial matter. We're about seven years in with zero failures and runtime that is more limited by power failures than stability.

so apart from the bare distro, I've added packages (all web based gui) to do the following.

Proxy with SSL interception and filtering.
Auto proxy implementation.
Content filtering and full web usage reports. Great for kids..and network users.
Antivirus scanning.
Packet level inspection and blocking (SNORt)
Dual WAN load balancing.
VPN for iOS/android/PC/MAC.
Guest wifi network on an isolated subnet.
Very sophisticated traffic limiters.(so guests don't eat your bandwidth)
Very comprehensive network analysis tools.
UPS master (NUT) signaling.

It's not for the novice, but very powerful. You can pretty much direct, limit, block and report on virtually anything. Price so far, other than a SNORt subscription for the distro is zero.

I did a few more tests last night of the 802.11AC speeds to my iPhone in the shop, pulling full HD files off our NAS. The 300Mbps falls off quickly as you move away from the access points. I've got the two EX7000s at 75% power, set to the same SSID and password but set on different channels. The iOS devices "roam" very nicely this way, and we now have good coverage over the 60x160 lot.

All of our music, movies and family memories are on a QNAP TS-470 NAS with a 10G link to my main editing PC. Using QNAPs Photos app we can browse 22MB RAW photos very nicely now over wifi. Between the QNAP app Qfile and a great player app, Infuse, every video I tested from the NAS, including the higher bitrate 1080p files, play perfectly over 802.11 AC. Quite impressed to the point that any new wifi devices we add will need to be AC capable.

iTunes is such a PITA, anything I can do to avoid it is welcome.