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Cathy asked: “I was wondering how I could extend our Wi-fi next door to my mom and dad’s. They have no wi-fi. We don’t have cable internet here – it’s all satellite. I didn’t know if there was an extender or something. They don’t need much internet, just enough to check an iPad once in awhile.”
Cathy, getting your WiFi to your parents house means closing the gap between your homes, the easiest way to make that happen is to move your own WiFi router as close as you can to their home, or to install a repeater as close as possible to their home.
If they already get WiFi, but only in an inconvenient place, you can install a repeater there too.
The repeaters themselves won’t necessarily be expensive, but they may be a little challenging to set up, and they may not place nice with your router. They also have a basic limitation: they cannot repeat what they cannot hear, so if they distance between the houses is too large, it may not be possible to send them a reliable signal.
Because you say that you live somewhere without cable Internet and the only choice is satellite, we’re going to hazard a guess that this is a rural setting and it’s possible that these houses aren’t very close together.
You may therefore want to look at dedicated outdoor wireless range extenders and bridges.
You may therefore want to look at dedicated outdoor wireless range extenders and bridges. The Ubiquiti Nanostation NSM5 sells for around $85 depending on where you buy it, and a pair of these can function as a wireless bridge between the houses reaching up to 1500 feet, if you have a clear line of sight (because it uses 5.8 GHz radio, it does need to be a clear line of sight–that frequency won’t even penetrate leaves).
So for $170 worth of gear, you can run an invisible 1500 foot cable between the houses. You’ll still need another wireless access point (NOT router) inside your parents house, but these are all one time expenses and you’ll be able to share the Internet service you already have.
You could also get them an inexpensive hotspot, to use with the iPad, but that may be a recurring bill you don’t want.