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Need help impoving my wifi layout

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OzzieGT

Senior member
The layout: Fiber comes into the garage, then goes through my router to a switch in the garage, which sends Cat6 to the rest of the house.

The problem: Router is in my garage and signal on the other end of the house is very poor. Basement also has poor signal.

I have a Linksys E4200. It has internal antennas so I can't really mess with them to try to improve the signal. I see 3 options:

1. Replace the router and keep it in the garage
2. Add a wireless extender somewhere in the center of the house and hope it gets a good signal from the router. Seems hard to find a decent quality extender for a good price. Any suggestions?
3. Get a wireless AP and put it on an ethernet port in the house. Any suggestions on a good one? Do I need to turn the wifi off on the router?

What should I do? Is there a better option?

Thanks
 
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Since you have CAT6 running through the house add in one or two spots additional Wireless Routers configured as Access Points.

Do not waste your time and money on Extenders it is Not really a Good functional solution.

Using Wireless Routers (or Modem/Wireless Router) as a Switch with an Access Point - http://www.ezlan.net/router_AP.html




😎
 
So if the other APs have the same wifi config it won't confuse my devices or cause other issues? Any recommendations on a good one which isn't too expensive? I saw amazon has a Ubiquiti networks "enterprise" AP for around $60.
 
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I would look into Unifi APs or other stand alone AP solution. Maybe one in the garage at the far end and one at the house in the middle. You may even get away with just one in the middle of the house (including garage) Proper AP systems will work together and hand off the signal depending where you are, so it's all a single network.
 
My experience with the handoff between multiple at point is at best setting at medium or minimal.

Keeping wifi on at full means you would have signal loss since one is fighting with the other and your device get confused who to use.
 
Airport Extreme can handle this gracefully! Not sure what juju that put into their routers but using wireless extender is 90% as fast as being on the first node with wifi. likewise wired extender..
 
inachu said:
My experience with the handoff between multiple at point is at best setting at medium or minimal.

Keeping wifi on at full means you would have signal loss since one is fighting with the other and your device get confused who to use.
Click to expand...

They don't get confused at all. They have minimum standards as to signal strength before they'll start looking at other access points. Once they hit that threshold and start looking, if another AP is stronger enough than the current AP, the client will switch.

That is how every single Wifi device works. What is different between them is the two different thresholds devices use (some OS/drivers allow you to change how agressive the client is in roaming, others are static).

There isn't any fighting with each other at all. Only "fighting" would be if you use the same channels/overlapping channels, and then they'll generate co-channel interference, where RTS/CTS comes in with wifi, since assumedly they aren't hidden nodes. At any rate, best to not set the APs on the same channels, so you have as much bandwidth as possible.

The only real issue you may experience is VOIP and video chat applications sometimes don't like roaming between APs (facetime will drop the call, sadly. I haven't tested with Skype or VOIP apps). If you don't use those heavily, or don't tend to walk all over your house while doing them, then it isn't an issue. Things like Netflix, SMB file transfers/video streaming, page loads, music stream, etc seem to handle roaming between APs very gracefully.

Set them all to the same SSID and password and the client will choose which one to connect to. Set them on different SSIDs if you want to manually choose (because they will not generally roam between APs if the SSIDs are different, unless the client completely loses the connection to its current SSID).

As for config, you want a different IP address for each AP at a minimum. Beyond that, they CAN have the exact same configuration, but I would personally set different channels (1, 6 or 11 for 2.4GHz, seperated by at least 2 channels on 5GHz if 11n or 4 channels if 11ac) to maximize bandwidth.
 
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