Improve wifi range with Plusnet fibre!?

[the_worrier]

Hi. I have a reasonable 65/18 fibre connection with Plusnet. The crud router they provide has weak wifi range. Can you recommend the best replacement for no more than, say £65-70? Don't need masses of advanced features but we do have a lot of devices accessing often at the same time...ps4, xbox, phones (4), etc.

 

[the_worrier]

Ok. Narrowed it down to Dlink dir-880l as a balance between features/performance and cost. I want external antennae and wall mountable also- which this has.

Does anyone have this router? I am concerned about having cables coming out of the unit on the same side as the antennae. Surely when wall mounted with the antennae pointing up the cables (ethernet & ac cable) should enter from below? How can it be wall mounted neatly with cabling interferring with antennae? Do you have a pic of it wall mounted? Google did not oblige.

Many thanks.

 

[thenewoc]

Good point. I guess the ports are more suited to it being on a tabletop rather than wall mounted and you can't please all the people all of the time.

Having said that it depends how far you need your cables to go. In my situation I have network ports on the wall close by so I could fit it onto some small lengths of wood to step it out a little from the wall and install a brush plate behind the router with some short patch cables leading to the wall mounted network sockets. If you don't have network structured cabling installed and your going from your devices all the way to the router perhaps you could look at shielded patch cables if you have an issue with interference.

Alternatively if you need more than 4 ports, use a network switch and then you'll only need one of the LAN ports on the router to connect to the switch.

Actually having looked again at its picture it looks like it would have a bit of a gap behind the base of the antennae, since the units feet ought to be stepping the unit slightly off the wall, so I think I will just route mine along top surface behind the base of the antennae and maybe use some sort of cable clip to help keep the cables secured in that position. If you can route the cables out to the right hand side it will only be a bit clumsy around the right hand antennae.