How do I share Internet between my house and the guest house (80 feet away)?

If the signal is strong enough from your house to reach 80 feet away then you only need a wireless card for the PC or laptop in the guest house.

If the signal is not strong enough, you need to get a second wireless access point for the guest house and then bridge wireless signal between your house and the guest house. It is a fairly simple job to implement this and the access point manual should explain how.

Hope this helps.
Karl

I agree, if the signal is able to reach to the guest house, then the laptops can pick it up and connect using their built-in wireless cards. From my experience, this may or may not work depending on terrain, wireless equipment power and quality and the obstructions and thickness of walls in between.

If you want to run Cat5 cabling or allow the PCs in the guest house to connect with a cable, then you will need a wireless bridge to pick up the wireless signal and convert it to a Cat5 Ethernet cable. This will get best signal if placed high in the guest house.

A repeater would be used if your signal from the house is not really strong enough, but you still want the PCs at the guest house to connect using wireless. The repeater needs to be placed up high, and simply picks up the wireless connection and retransmits it.

-tigermatt

A repeater would be best bet here, Just place the repeater near a window in the "guest" house as long as you still get signal, than its just a few wireless cards away from connectivity.

OR

Playing off the repeater idea, buy a DLINK SWITCH (cheap) and put it at the end of the repeater for wired connectivity, two cheap solutions to your problem, enjoy :)

Linksys sells many wireless products.  I don't know which to purchase.  If you can be specific as to the equipment I need would be helpful.  (It does not have to be Linksys, it can be NetGear, D-link, etc.)

Main House:
1) Satelite Internet to modem
2) Modem connected to Linksys Wireless Access Point Router (BEFSW11S4).
3) Dell laptop connected wirelessly to Linksys WAP.

4) What equipment do I need to send/transmit/repeat the signal to the Guest house?  The current signal is not strong enough.
4a)  Do I unscrew one of the attenna's on the WAP and connect it to an outside antenna?

Guest House
5)  What equipment to I need to receive the signal from the Main House?
5a)  Do I need an outside antenna on the Guest House?

Thanks.

Oh, I do not want to run cat5 cable from the main house to the guest house.

Do you see any signal whatsoever from the guesthouse? Where in your house is the WAP located.

The ideas proposed are not entailing running Cat5 from the main house to guest house. They are actually referring to having two Ethernet networks, linked with wireless. A simple diagram might be as below:

DSL Wireless Router <----------Wireless---------> Guest House ____ Ethernet Connections
(Main House) ___ Ethernet connections

In my opinion, 80 feet, in the line-of-sight is good enough distance for any decent wifi card to catch signal.
So, basically, if your current built-in or external wifi card doesn't get a decent signal, you can go for a wifi card with higher power rating (in the range of 200-500 mw). This should give you much better signal strength.
Apart from this, I don't think you require any other hardware.

Hope this helps.

I guess 80 feet is not a big distance to include an additional device to amplify the signal. Firstly, test your existing setup by taking your laptop to the guest house and trying to access the internet. If it works fine then you do not need to bother about installing any new device and waste money. But if the signal strength is week then go for a wireless repeater.

You can go for Linksys Wireless-G WRE54G Repeater. It is cheap, very small in size and can be mounted anywhere without any brackets. It can be easily be moved without changing any settings and does not require any wiring. Also it has good technical support and produces good signal strength.

Just buy a Linksys WAP54G, use it to connect as a CLIENT to the main house router's wireless. If Linksys cannot connect as a client well, flash the memory with DDwrt and it will work just great!

It would be even better to buy a wrt54GL and do the same, reload with DDwrt and use as a client. It works great!!

If you're in an urban area, I believe as time goes on you will find 802.11g less and less satisfying, especially as more 2.4GHz 802.11n offerings appear and people open them up to 40MHz-wide channels, pretty much obliterating the lower 10 channels in the b/g band, forcing everyone still using 11g to channel 11 (Europe et al get more channels, but they overlap channel 11 anyway).  Your mileage may vary.