My wife and I just sold our house, and for the next 7 or so months while we build a new home, we are renting. The rental property has NBN installed and annoyingly the NBN box is located inside of the garage.
Googling seems to suggest that this is quite common, especially for NBN fibre connections. The problem with the NBN box being located in the garage is obvious: the reception sucks and in larger homes, you get blackspots.
You have to plug a modem into the NBN NTD device and because the NBN NTD is inside of the garage, it means the modem has to be close to plug into the appropriate port.
There were a few options to consider ranging from expensive to affordable:
- Running a large ethernet cable and putting the modem inside of the house somewhere (affordable).
- Purchasing a wifi range extender (affordable, but unreliable)
- Creating a mesh network (Google Nest Wifi or Netgear Orbi) which is expensive
In most circumstances, you would wire up ethernet ports throughout the house and have them done by a registered cabler. Being a rental, this is out of the equation.
The solution was to just run a large ethernet cable, neatly tuck it away against the edges of the walls and place the modem inside of the house. I am considering adding a Google Nest Wifi into the mix as well, but for now, this is an acceptable (not ideal) solution.
Yep. That’s what I would have done. I’m presuming from this that your cable can get from garage to inside house without running “outside”? Otherwise you might have had to consider (but I don’t know) the potential breakdown of the cable due to UV light or whatever.
Keen to know your experience with running a large cable to have the modem inside the house. I am running in similar situation and agree with proposed options and running a large cable seems to be most affordable and probably most reliable.
@imzi
Definitely was the better solution. I have a big blue CAT cable running along the edge of the hallway into the house and despite the fact you see it initially, it’s neatly tucked away enough you forget it is there. Stopping short of drilling holes into the wall, it worked really well. Fortunately, it’s a tiled house, so I taped it to the tile floor.