On 2013-03-29 Colin Stanners wrote:
Most houses have some way to hide a cable from one end to the other - tiled ceiling / air return ducts / under baseboard just coming out to go to the next room through a hole in the wall.
If you use ducts (for sure!) or go between floors (maybe, Adam?) you should really use plenum rated cable. You won't find any pre-made plenum cables. If you're in a pinch, I can sell you bare plenum-rated CAT6 in whatever length you need, and the price isn't too bad. I must buy in 1000 feet, but you can buy from me in any-feet (ie. 50).
I find going down to the basement works best. Or, simply position both your AP's in the basement and never go upstairs. You can place them near the ceiling, most AP's have little screw holes in the back for wall mounting.
As for the sane-ness of the whole plan, there are a number of AP's that can do repeating, without cables. I know Apple makes one (though I would never recommend an Apple product). I have personally seen these setups working in houses quite fine. How they both send and receive without tripping over themselves is beyond me, though if you talk to AP-1 on ch 1 and talk to network AP-2 on ch 11 then why not?
As for N/G: I've heard people say that N may not give you longer range or even better speeds. I think Sean Cody used to say that. Perhaps the older N gear suffers from this but newer gear doesn't? Personally, I've dealt with more crap N gear that never seems to work quite right than G gear. The moral of the story: if N seems to crap out, try tweaking all AP's down to G.