![]() ![]() The challenge with extending Wi-Fi in this way is attenuation. Using your home’s coaxial cable to extend the distance of a Wi-Fi router’s antenna is no different than using an electrical extension cord to move an appliance like a TV further away from a wall plug. In fact, inside your router, a much shorter cable is already doing exactly that. Wi-Fi, much like any other type of radio wave, starts off life as an electrical signal before it gets transmitted through the air via the antenna. Coaxifi is a four-way splitter specifically designed to split the Wi-Fi signals picked up by your router’s antennas, which are a much higher frequency - anywhere from 2.4 to 5.8 GHz - a traditional splitter wouldn’t be able to pass them correctly.Īs strange as it sounds, modern coaxial cable is an excellent conduit for Wi-Fi. Traditional cable splitters are designed to split TV signals – which typically operate at anywhere from 0 – 1,000 MHz. If you’ve already got a splitter on your cables, why not just re-wire the inputs and outputs to connect it up the right way for the antennas? You may be wondering why you need Coaxifi’s splitter at all. Lastly, the kit’s antennas must be attached to cable outlets around your house, which are now connected to the Coaxifi splitter. Our test house was wired recently, so cable quality was not a factor, but not everyone will be so lucky. But older homes often have older cables, and these cables may not be able to reliably pass Wi-Fi frequencies. ![]() Coaxifi is designed to work with RG6 coaxial - a thick, well-shielded type of coax used in most homes built in the last 30 years. Then, there’s the question of cable type. That’s a legal grey area, because some cable companies are defensive about tampering with such equipment, even if it’s on your property. In our case, we had to open up a junction box owned by the cable company to gain access to the end of our chosen cable. The Coaxifi splitter itself is very small, and weather-proof, but it does not come with the rubber seals needed to protect the five adapters from the elements. That could be in the basement, in a closet, or even outside the home for us, it was on an outside wall. You then need to find the point in your home where this cable is joined to the other cables by a splitter. Installation involves removing one of your router’s antennas and connecting the closest available coax cable to that port using an included SMA-to-Type-F adapter (coaxial cable and router antennas both use screw-on connections, but they’re different sizes). This is all you need to turn your unused coax cabling into a network extender for a router. The company also throws in a cable tester. The Coaxifi kit is a custom built four-way splitter - which is the heart of the system - four multi-band antennas, and six SMA-to-Type-F adapters, which let you connect everything to the router. Better still, pricing starts at $90 for Kickstarter backers ($130 at retail) – a lot less than a mesh router system. That’s why we were curious to try out a new Kickstarter-funded solution from a company called EthernetCSP in our Coaxifi review.Ĭoaxifi is an antenna extender and splitter which lets you connect your home’s existing coaxial cable to one of your router’s antenna ports, significantly improving Wi-Fi coverage by placing additional antennas in up to four locations around your house. To take advantage of these new products - which do indeed improve WI-Fi for most people - you’ll have to ditch your existing router and invest a minimum of $260 – possibly, much more. ![]() ![]() Still others make use of portions of the Wi-Fi spectrum typically reserved for military and commercial radar known as DFS. Some of these use mesh technology, placing several Wi-Fi nodes around your home, while others take a brute-force approach, placing up to eight antennas on a single, powerful router. Requires external antenna-equipped routerĪs we populate our homes with more and more wireless devices, the quest for better Wi-Fi coverage has become something of an obsession, leading to a slew of new Wi-Fi products. ![]()
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