Outdoor WiFi

There are several ways how to extend WiFi range outside. If you live in a house and would like to connect to the Internet when relaxing in your backyard, a new router might be able to cover your entire house and your backyard with a strong and stable WiFi signal.

Modern high-end routers have several antennas that allow them to transmit a WiFi signal over long distances and communicate with multiple devices at the same time. They also support beamforming technology, which improves signal strength and transmission speeds by directing the signal to individual devices connected to the router.

But if you’re happy with your existing router, an outdoor WiFi extender might be a cheaper solution. A WiFi extender has two antennas — one for capturing wireless signals and the other one for transmitting them after they have been amplified by the extender. You connect a WiFi range extender to your existing wireless network and position it somewhere between your wireless router and the place you would like to extend your wireless network to.

The WiFi range extender creates a new wireless network to which you can connect just like to the original one. The biggest downside of WiFi range extenders is the need to manually switch to the stronger network when standing at the edge of the original network.

An outdoor WiFi mesh network removes the need to switch between networks by creating a single network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Data packets in a mesh network can be transmitted dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible to find the most efficient route.

What’s more, outdoor mesh networks can be easily extended, and modern mesh network solutions have made very easy for anyone to create a mesh network at home.

To choose which method for extending WiFi range outside is the best for you, you should first measure the range of your existing WiFi network using a WiFi analyzer app such as NetSpot. We recommend NetSpot because it is trusted and praised by professionals and home users alike, works on both macOS and Windows, and can be downloaded for free.

With NetSpot, you can easily create a comprehensive WiFi site survey to discover how far your network reaches and where signal dead spots are located. Ideally, you should extend your WiFi network to cover the entire area you want to cover and not much farther than that. Extending your WiFi network too much would leave you vulnerable to more attackers than necessary.

Every time you make an adjustment, make sure to use NetSpot to check whether the result of the adjustment was positive or negative. Wireless signals are influenced by many different factors, and it’s not always possible to predict which adjustments are going to yield positive and which are going to yield negative results.