I am connected from the office in the back of my house via my ASUS K55A laptop with the built-in Qualcom Atheros single-band network adapter. I have about 100 yards to reach my Cisco Linksys E2500 dual-band router inside the house. It usually works but is somewhat intermittent. We tried to improve the signal by buying an AE2500 Cisco dual-band adapter shown here
http://screencast.com/t/FIDbIgI4Jt3W. It installed properly with the disk supplied but I can no longer see the 5ghz network when I plug it in despite the fact that the 2.4ghz is working. How can I get the 5ghz network to show up when I plug in the Cisco AE2500?
- line of sight from one to the other or not?
- absence or presence of walls or other obstructions in the path. Outside walls are worse than inside walls.
- antennas
- multipath (presence of strong reflectors) that may help or hinder and is very sensitive +/- if present.
Power is OK as an enhancement but not nearly so much as what you can do with proper antenna selection and placement and orientation. Higher is not necessarily better. Line of sight is. A clear line of sight is great but only if the antenna pattern uses it (that is you can see with the eyeball but the antenna pattern may not be max in that direction). And the "antenna pattern" really means the composite of antennas at both ends.