How to Get Optimised WiFi in Your Garden / Outdoor Office / Shed / Summer House

With the recent sunny weather and with more people working from home than ever before, many of our customers are working office hours in their gardens. As a result, people need reliable WiFi coverage in their garden or shed in order to be productive.

A common misconception is that this can be achieved by simply using an access point inside the house or attached to the outside of the house in an attempt to reach your outdoor office with a reliable WiFi signal.

This never works well for two reasons:

The signal must pass through the the outer walls of the house, which weakens the signal (if the AP is inside), across the garden, and through the shed walls to reach any devices inside and then the devices must get a signal back over the same path.

Even if the signal from an access point makes it to the shed, the device (phone, laptop, tablet, etc) will often have a low-power radio that cannot get a return signal back – a strong signal in both directions is required for a good connection.

There are two ways we can fix the issue:

1. Run an ethernet cable out to the outdoor office/shed. This is the most reliable method and will maintain the speed you receive at your router all the way out to the shed. If the shed has power then there will likely already be cables running to the shed and the ethernet cable can be installed alongside these. Be sure to use outdoor rated cable such as Ubiquiti’s TC-PRO inside a cable conduit to ensure the cable lasts.
2. If you cannot run a cable (or do not want to) for whatever reason then the alternative is to set up a wireless point to point link such as the Pre-configured Loco5ac Bridge Kit with one end mounted externally on the house (and cabled back to the router) and the other mounted on the outside of the shed/office with a cable running internally. The NS-5ACL is a directional wireless unit and will provide a strong signal between the two linked units. You can then connect a wireless access point to the end of the cable from the unit on the shed in order to provide WiFi access to devices within the shed.

As an extra option to point 2, you could also go for a more advanced setup, if you have a more permanent outbuilding to use as your outdoor office. We’ve already built a pre-configured kit to use for this very purpose – the Ubiquiti Plug and Play Outdoor Home WiFi Extension Kit

Using one of the three options listed above will allow you to provide a strong and stable WiFi signal to devices within your shed/outdoor office.

You could even take it a step further and install a network switch like the USW-Flex-Mini to provide an ethernet connection to a PC or laptop thereby improving their connectivity and reducing the load on the access point.

Whichever solution you choose, we can help advise on the exact equipment you’ll need for your specific outdoor office setup. Please call our team of experts on 01449 724255 or email shop@linitx.com for further information.