WiFi for a garden office in Kent: three ways to do it

Why it fails

Garden offices went up all over Kent in the last few years, from Ashford to Thanet, and most of them share the same problem. The signal has to get out of the house, across the garden and through the office wall. Every one of those takes a chunk off it. A booster in the kitchen window helps for a week and then you are back on your phone's hotspot for the video call.

Option one: a point to point wireless link

Two small dishes, one on the house and one on the office, pointing at each other. They carry the full broadband speed across a garden of any normal size, and a proper access point inside the office turns it back into WiFi. Good where digging is not possible. Fitted in half a day.

Option two: an armoured cable

A Cat6 cable in an armoured jacket, buried in the garden or clipped along a fence, with an access point in the office. The most reliable option and the one we recommend whenever the ground can be opened. Nothing to align, nothing to interfere with it.

Option three: fibre

For long gardens, or where the office has its own cabinet with cameras and a phone system, fibre between the buildings is the professional answer and no longer expensive. No distance limit and immune to interference.

What we do on the day

Survey the route, run the link, fit an access point on the same network name as the house so your laptop does not know it moved, and add a camera on the office if you want one. See WiFi and networking, data cabling and fibre, and the guide on mesh versus wired access points.