Boosting wireless signal, best options?

Phate

Phate

Phate

Caporegime
Joined
1 Nov 2003
Posts
35,691
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
Hey people,

Ok, the scenario...

GF's parents have their router in the basement, and have an ethernet cable running up to the ground floor to the centre of the house where they have a second Netgear router (acquired from GF's brother as an old ISP router) as a slave, purely used to bring the wireless signal up.

Now this house is old, has thick solid walls, and its big. Generally, unless you're in the rooms directly next to the hallway you struggle with wifi signal.

I'm looking at the best options for improving the signal and reliability of the wifi network.

Unfortunately, the Netgear will not take an external antenna, so that rules out that possibility.

Some options I have thought of...

Mains line plug in wireless extensions and putting one extension in the main rooms that are used so the landing upstairs, living room downstairs.

Replacing the Netgear ISP router with one that has a much better signal output (recommendations welcome) - I used to have a Netgear Rangemax (one with the blue dome on the top) years ago and that always did a good job, could look for one of those?

Any thoughts of what they would do?

Thanks
Jake
 
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I had the same issue when I moved house three months ago.. I ditched the home hub and went back to my billion router which helped a bit. Then I tried a plug in wireless range extender that was useless. Finally I tried power line wireless extender and that works, no more problems with wireless connectivity anywhere in the house.
 
I'd try and avoid home plugs. They're horrible things and while they're okay when they work, I've had a number of experiences in multiple houses of them not quite working properly. Not quite working properly is annoying and probably worse than not working at all!.

In one case they were causing inexplicable network issues with a machine running Windows 2008 R2 server. The sensible computer literate person in me is still sceptical that the combination of home plugs, that specific NIC and OS were the issue; but changing out either the home plugs or the OS resolved the problem and reinstating them had it immediately re-occur.

I've also seen throughput falling off exponentially as additional home plugs are added, so if you do really need them, try and stick to just using two. They should be a bodge of last resort.

The TP-Link pair I am currently using to extend the network behind the Tv die after a few hours of use with bandwidth heavy content (e.g., streaming HD video content).
 
On the contrary, I've used several makes and models of homeplugs in different buildings and have never failed to be impressed. I'd vote for a wifi enabled homeplug pair myself.
 
Replace router #1 with a decent one. (is it adsl? If so dsl-n55u)

Hardwire in some cat5e or cat6 cable, connect each pc up with that.

Add one or two access points using the cat cable on each floor where necessary.

Don't bother with homeplugs.
 
bledd. said:
Replace router #1 with a decent one. (is it adsl? If so dsl-n55u)

Hardwire in some cat5e or cat6 cable, connect each pc up with that.

Add one or two access points using the cat cable on each floor where necessary.

Don't bother with homeplugs.
Click to expand...

This is the ideal solution, but for 99% of people homeplugs will be fine and will save you a world of grief for either hideous cables running all over the house or hours of work burrying them properly.

I've been using TP link homeplugs without issue for a couple of years now they were littereally plug and forget, I've never had any of my friends who use them complain either but of course your millage may vary which is where DSR comes in buy a set try them and return them.

I wouldn't bother ugrading the main router single point wifi in old houses is a waste of time.
 
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