BT Home Hub - range

A friend has BT Home Hub in his bungalow, the hub box being located roughly in the middle of the house, however when he tries to use a laptop at either end of the building there is not enough signal strength to login. The distances are about 50feet in one direction ( 3 walls - brick/block built) and 60feet in the other (again 3 brick/block walls). The walls are only 3/4 side to side - there are hallways and doors through them.
In my bungalow when signal strength was low i bought a high gain replacement antenna for my Netgear modem and this has turned a Low 1 bar connection into a 4 bar connection.
My questions are - should BT Home hub have a better range than we are experiencing, and does anyone now of a replacement hi-gain antenna for the hub box (and how to get the fitted one off???)

Not sure its the home hub I think most wireless Lans will have trouble getting a signal though 3 fairly solid walls.

Does the HH support WDS? if so you may be able to place a WDS supported router in the middle to act as a relay and boost the signal.

Problem is the available bandwidth then gets reduced by about 50%

Yup WDS is enabled by default on the home hub.

Have you tried changing the channel to 11 for example, it usually gives better performance on 11 but its different for everybody. Muck about and see. Use the link below to access wireless channel settings. Username and password are "admin".

http://192.168.1.254/cgi/b/_wli_/cfg/?ce=1&be=1&l0=4&l1=0

You need to change channel selection from automatic to manual.

"Have you tried changing the channel"

Always worth trying a couple of different ones [1] in case there's something else already operating on these frequencies in the neighbourhood. Usually it'll just be WiFi, in which case it might show up as an available service. If it's something other than usable WiFi, such as a 2.4GHz videosender, or a WiFi signal too weak to use but strong enough to reduce available SNR, it might just show up as unexpectedly low SNR on a site survey utility, Netstumbler, what have you.

[1] There aren't actually very many non-overlapping WiFi channels so there's no point trying them all. 1 and 11 are popular defaults so may already be occupied [edit: e.g. if there are neighbours with WiFi]. Anyone remember which are the usual non-overlapping ones? 1, 6, 11 ???

Edited by c_j (Tue 27-Mar-07 12:21:15)

I changed from 6 to 11 and it does seem faster and smoother.

Thanks folks, tried changing to chan 11 and helped in one direction (towards the lounge end of the bungalow) by raising the received sign strength from 0/1 bars to 1/2 bars, however the other end is still in a black spot!!!
Seems no one has heard of a hi-gain or improved aerial for this box........
Cheers
Stan