WiFi extenders

twistedstem

The wife andi are having issues with our wifi being spotty in the outer rooms of our house.

Do any of you have any experiences with these?

TX98Z28

Xfinity has a booster for whole house, theres others as well, been looking at them slightly my self same problem. It's crazy how much faster it is straight off the main line and not going through the wifi router.

BKDog

TPLink extender works great, easy to use and set up at home. I like mine and have used it since July.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0195Y0A42/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Usaf06

I use a netgear wifi extender, no issues

TruDog

...Re-BooT dat MuthaThA .....Patience.....and Res BooT again....

VegasFrank

Get a better Wi-Fi router and or modem. Extender slow you down if you're streaming video.

avengethis

I'v recently made the switch to a mesh network. I went with a Netgear Orbi setup as it has the built in Disney Circle as well so I can monitor and control my kids screen time. The mesh is the better alternative to an extender as extenders can be alright but are very basic in nature and dont always perform the best.

0patience

We have a Netgear NightHawk router. It isn't cheap, but we can get wifi out in the yard without any troubles.

@avengethis That Orbi looks interesting. Gonna have to look into it.

Yakster

One thing to keep in mind with the edges of your house if you are using 802.11 b/g/n on 2.4 GHz is that you may be closer to your neighbor's WiFi AP (access point) than your own so if they're on the same channel the interference from their AP will kill your performance. In these bands only channels 1, 6, and 11 are very useful because otherwise you'll be overlapping with other APs using multiple channels for increased bandwidth. You can download a WiFi scanner app for your phone or PC (I think InSSIDer is still free) and walk around to see what channels your neighbors are using and you might be able to clear up a lot of problems by just changing the channel.

If you're able to use 802.11 a/n/ac on the 5 GHz band you have a lot more channels available and less problems with interference with neighbors, but the signals don't penetrate walls as well as the lower band. Also, there's lots of clients that don't support 5 GHz bands.

If you chose to use a WiFi extender, make sure that you can set the security to WPA2 or WPA3 modes. Many old WiFi extenders only support the WEP security protocol which was cracked a long time ago.

Mesh networks are an interesting alternative, but can suffer performance issues in large mesh networks. A good home mesh network would use the 5 GHz band to connect the APs together for backhaul and connect to clients on 2.4 and 5 GHz at the nodes. Typically clients that connect to mesh APs further from the Internet connection point will suffer because they have to share the traffic with all the other mesh APs. This affects city-wide outdoor mesh networks but may not be a big deal in your house. Think of a parking lot after a game lets out. Cars from the first row of parking reach the exit with a 50% reduction because they theoretically alternate from cars from the other rows. Cars from the 2nd row get a 25% reduction because they're alternating with the first row and everyone behind them. Keep halving this with each additional row. As long as you have a small mesh network with lots of overhead bandwidth and fast processing this may not even affect you.

One thing I did in my home to solve a coverage problem was that I installed a new AP up high for best coverage (on top of my TV) but to solve connection problems in the dining room where the kids do homework and the living room where the network printer is I ran a cable from a wired switch port from my primary AP around the edges of my family room and up to a baker's rack in the kitchen so that the clients in this part of the house can connect to this secondary AP instead of the one in the family room. I set up the secondary AP to act as a dumb AP only and the primary AP is set up as a wireless router serving DHCP and acting as a firewall.

ShawnOL

avengethis

What I liked about the Netgear Orbi mesh setup is you can run the back-haul two different ways. You can run an Ethernet line form main hub to the satellite or you there is a separate 5ghz channel that handles the back-haul between the two units if running a cable is not doable. For me I was able to get an Ethernet cable from my main unit to the satellite. I have 4 xbox ones, 5 phones, 3 laptops, 5 tv's and probably some other devices all on the network and many using lots of bandwidth. Our "cable" is Hulu Live so all of our tv is streaming. The setup has worked really well for us.