[Darth-Apple]

Hello all! I am in desperate need of some advice and some help with some networking related things. It's probably easy, but basically, I have no idea what I'm doing and it's a pretty specific need. The details are important. We have some weird limitations, so read on.

We basically have absolutely horrible wifi at work, but our actual ethernet is great. Wifi is horribly unreliable and the router cannot be replaced. It's about 3-4 mbps at best, and it usually isn't even that. Our ethernet is 100+ mbps reliably. 

We have four iPad 4's that we do pretty much all of our work on. Those iPads are connected to wifi and they perform so horribly that we can barely do our jobs. We try connecting them to the cellular network instead (which performs great), but the iPad 4th gen has a pretty old modem that isn't really all that much more reliable. Trust me, T-mobile has the best data that you can find in our area. We're talking 60-70 mbps easily, but on these iPad 4's, they are too old to connect well. It's not really much of a better option for us either.

What I'm trying to do is somehow get that ethernet's internet over to the iPad, either through a wired connection of some sort, or by some sort of tethering. Bluetooth tethering isn't an option (would be slow anyhow, lmao), and we have no ability for the desktops that are connected via ethernet to create some sort of wifi hotspot either. What I'm wondering is if there is maybe some sort of really good (and inexpensive) USB 3 stick that can create a wifi network from the ethernet that would perform well. That'd be perfect if it performed at at least 15-20 mbps and was reliable enough to handle a few devices at once. If not, if there was some sort of ethernet to lightning connecter, that'd work too. Not ideal, we'd need one for each iPad and the wires would have to be long, but if it worked well enough, we'd happily take it.

We cannot replace the main router (trust me, we can't. It'd screw up a lot of very complex configuration). We could plug in a brand new router into some random ethernet port. The question is where we'd find one. Are good ones cheap enough to make this worth while? 

Some advice would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance! I'm being dead serious. We can barely do our jobs, I'm about to shell money out on this, and I hope it won't break the bank.

[Thomas]

Run an ethernet cable from the modem to a new router. I just bought a Linksys for $70. Literally almost anything is going to be faster than 4mbps.

[SpookyZalost]

ok so since it's an ipad... it should have a usb/thunderbolt port on the bottom normally used for charging... however you can actually get an ethernet dongle for them!

then you can hardware the ipads if you wanted to.



this one here has both a usb port and an ethernet port, you can use the remaining port to keep them on power too.

otherwise you're best bet is probably to setup a second router, one with at least 2 antennai, probably more, but ideally one that can handle a lot of traffic, another option is a wireless access point, you can have a dedicated one just for the ipads and such in the office, connect via eithernet, setup and bam!