A real Faraday Cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic radiation. Over the past few years I have been struggling with my condo because sometimes it feels like I am living inside of a Faraday Cage: my cell reception always sucks and I never get enough signal strength from my wireless access point.
Once we got the two AppleTVs, it got worse. Two AppleTVs streaming off two separate Macs, both on 802.11g is too much of a pain in the ass, and this is assuming the network is running normally. Mine wasn't, so performance for PJs AppleTV was always subpar when used in streaming mode. Because of that, his is setup to pull the actual content instead of streaming it.
Here's more or less what the network was like:
Red: 100MB ethernet.
Blue: 54MB wireless.
Green: Mac / AppleTV pair
I decided to hell with it, why bother with wireless when the condo is just 1000 square feet? I asked my friends around, and they all recommended the same: wire it yourself.
One of my coworkers lent me his crimping tool and his line testing gizmo, plus a bag of RJ45 connectors. I spent about $40 in cable, plus some really neat cable staples and a $10 5-port 100MB ethernet switch.
Last night was patch cord training, since I had not put together an ethernet cord since sometime in 1998. After two hours I had three completed patch cords that could actually pass the gizmo tests.
Today I wired my office, ran a line to PJ's room and made more patch cords. This is what the network looks like right now:
Red: VoIP line (off the Comcast Arris MTA)
Green: 100MB ethernet in my office
Blue: 100MB line to PJs room
Orange: 100MB ethernet in PJs room
There was virtually no benefit to the Mac Book Pro (which was never more than 10 feet away from the wireless access point), but my AppleTV is a little bit more responsive. The real benefit is that now there are no more networking issues with the stuff in PJs bedroom.
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