Guide · whole-property wifi

How to get internet to a shed with no power.

A shed with no power and no cable to it is not a dead end. It is two small problems wearing one big coat. First, get the connection out there without digging a trench across the paddock. Second, power the little bit of gear once it arrives. Solve both and the shed runs on the same internet as the house, no mains and no cable in the ground. The short version: a wireless link carries your existing connection to the shed, and either one Power over Ethernet cable from a nearby powered building or a small solar panel and battery keeps the gear alive. That is the whole trick.

Last updated 1 July 2026 · by Alien IT Solutions

Forget the trench

Most people assume getting internet to a shed means digging. It almost never does. Trenching cable across a rural block is slow, it is expensive, and the moment someone drives a post in or a plough finds it, you are digging again. A buried cable is a liability you paid to install.

So we do not run one. We carry your house connection to the shed over a wireless link instead. Two small aerials, one at the house end and one at the shed, pointed at each other. As long as they can see each other, the link stands up over real distance and there is nothing in the ground to cut. The only cable involved is a short run at each end. That is the connection problem sorted, and it is the easy half.

The hard half is power, and it is smaller than you think

Here is the bit that trips people up. They picture running power to the shed the way you would power a fridge or a welder, and they give up before they start. But WiFi gear does not eat like a welder. An access point and a wireless radio between them draw a tiny amount of electricity, closer to a phone charger than an appliance. You are not powering a workshop. You are powering two small boxes that sip.

Once you accept how little the gear actually needs, the whole problem gets easier. You do not need mains at the shed. You need a source of a few watts, and there are two clean ways to get that.

Option one: one cable that carries power too

Power over Ethernet, or PoE, sends both the data and the power down a single network cable. No separate power supply out at the shed at all. If there is a powered building, a house, a pump shed, anything on mains, within about 100 metres of your target shed, this is the answer. You run one cable from the powered building to the shed's access point, and that cable does both jobs.

It is the simplest option there is when a power source sits close, because there is nothing to size, nothing to maintain and nothing to run flat. If you have mains within reach, take it. The moment the distance grows past what a network cable will do reliably, PoE stops being the clean answer and solar takes over.

Option two: a small solar panel and a battery

When the shed is genuinely off-grid, nothing on mains anywhere near it, you power the gear where it stands. A modest solar panel charges a battery through the day, and the battery carries the gear overnight and through the flat, grey days when the panel is barely working. Because the gear draws so little, the panel and battery do not need to be big. This is off-grid done properly, not off-grid done nervously.

The part that matters, and the part people get wrong when they buy a kit off a shelf, is sizing. Guess too small and you get a shed that goes dark every cloudy week, which is worse than useless because you cannot trust it. So we size the panel and the battery to the actual draw of the gear and the actual sun where you are, with real headroom for a run of overcast days. Set it once, set it right, and you stop thinking about it. That is the whole point of doing it properly instead of cheaply.

One connection, not a second bill

There is a bonus in doing it this way, and it is a dollar one. The shed does not get its own internet account. It shares the one connection you already pay for at the house, whether that is Starlink, NBN or a 4G service. We spread that single plan across the property, which means the separate mobile dongle you have been running out at the shed, and often the standalone plan on a shed camera, can be dropped.

People end up paying for three or four connections to cover one property because each new corner got its own patch. Pull it all back onto one plan and you are usually paying less every month than you were, for something that actually works everywhere. Cost-effectiveness matters out here, and stacking up subscriptions is the expensive way to do a job the house connection can already do.

How we actually do it

There is no magic to the process, just doing each step in order.

1. We walk the property first. We check the line of sight from the house to the shed, because the wireless link needs the two ends to see each other, and we find where the nearest power sits. That one look tells us whether PoE or solar is your answer.
2. We link it, then power it. The wireless link goes in with no trench. Then the shed end gets powered off either a PoE cable from the nearby building or a solar panel and battery sized to the gear. No mains required either way.
3. You get WiFi in the shed, and a person to call. The shed runs on the one house connection, off-grid power and all. We maintain it, and if it ever stops, you ring a real person, not a queue.

Who builds it

Paddock Networks is the whole-property connectivity service of Alien IT Solutions, an Australian IT, networks and connectivity company with more than 18 years behind it. We bring one connection across the whole place instead of leaving each corner to fend for itself. For the link itself over serious distance, see Long Range WiFi. If you still need the connection at the house first, Starlink Rural. And for water tanks on the same network, Tank Monitoring.

Questions people ask

Light up the shed, power or not.

Tell us where the shed is and how far the nearest power sits. We will work out the link and how to power it, and give you a straight answer with no pressure. Get a quote.