wi-fi at home

[minneman]

I live in the country and have DSL in my home with a router for my daughters laptop for school, smartphones.

my question is I have a steel sided shop 100' away from my home and cant get signal from the house, can I just add another router to the phone line in the shop? (same phone line as in house) there is a filter on that line now that the shop phone cord is plugged into. would I loose the phone then?

[Whoaru99]

I believe you would need another DSL modem in the garage to do what you're thinking. However, I think you can only sign in on one modem/one account at a time. So, while you could put another modem out there, I believe it would be an either or deal...you could use either the one in the house or the one in the shop, but not both at the same time.

You might want to look into some sort of wi-fi extender or maybe some way to run a wire out there.

[delcecchi]

I don't think two modems on one line will work. The easiest thing is to run an ethernet cable from the router to the shop. They can go several hundred feet (100 meters). Outdoor or buriable cable is available. Since the building is steel, a wi-fi repeater solution probably won't work.

[Shack]

I am almost positive that Whoaru99 is correct about running dual modems on the same DSL service/line but honestly I have never tried to sign in twice at the same time to a PPPoE account.

If I may ask what kind of phone line did you run out to the shop? If it is Cat5 or Cat6 you can install a dual jack plate in the shop with one RJ-11 for phone and one RJ-45 for ethernet. If you had I would assume it is most likely Cat5. Cat5 has four pair (eight wires) within it. Ethernet used for 10/100 Mbps actually only uses two pairs (four wires) one for send and one for receive. Voice/Telephone use only one pair (two wires) so you would even have one pair left. You wouldn't be able to run gigabit ethernet as this uses all four pairs of wires, but a 10/100 Mbps connection is most likely what you are using anyways.

So yes, if you ran Cat5 cable you could run both phone and ethernet out to your shop. If you ran Cat3 then you could not do this.

[Shack]

Something like this is what I am talking about:

But, if you did run Cat5 you could just get two splitters for this sole purpose, saving you the hassle of manually splitting and slicing. You would just install RJ-45 jacks on both ends configured correctly and do something like this:

just use splitters along with properly configuring the Cat5 to each of the RJ-45 jacks so you get your voice RJ-11 and data RJ-45 jacks on both ends.