wifi extender / repeater recommendations & advice

thedoc46

thedoc46

thedoc46

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2003
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Expat in the USA
I need to address a wifi deadspot in my home.

I've looked at wifi extenders, but the ones i've seen, ask for a different SSID.. Normally your regular one with _EXT at the end of the SSID.

I'd prefer to not go down this route, as i don't want to be messing around with making sure i'm on the right wifi, depending on where i am in my house.

Also worth noting is i have CAT6 wired to everywhere, so i'm hoping i can get one that i can just plug into an existing CAT6 port, near the deadspot, and just extend my existing SSID.... Is that possible ?

sorry never looked into these repeaters / extenders.

I also need to do the same for my mother. She however doesn't have any cat6 running thru her home, so will need just to 'extend' from an existing wifi signal.

So really need TWO... but one is able to use CAT6 the other is not.

What do you guys recommend ?
 
In your case, an access point is what you need. There are many ways you can go: at one end of the spectrum just use some old kit you've got lying around, at the other end various people will soon come along to tell you to buy two Ubiquity access points. :p

In your mother's case a repeater is indeed what you want. It obviously needs to be somewhere where it gets decent signal but can reach the dead spot so think about positioning. These are usually fine for basic use but if the distance is large and/or there are a lot of walls you might need to use something else like a powerline at the router end and a powerline-cum-AP at the other.
 
If the house is already wired, then a wireless access point is exactly what you want.

Repeaters are crap, access points are great.
 
I don't have any spare routers knocking around, so will need to buy an access point.. Any recommendations ?
 
I spent ages setting up a repeater/extender with the help of a very kind chap on here, worked brilliant for about a day, then caused me no end of grief with it failing to communicate properly with my routers DCHP server so my devices couldn't get a working ip address.

Ended up having to reboot it every morning for it to work, naturally I gave up after about a week.

I will be waiting until I've finished sorting my wired network then I'll be using an old netgear router as an AP like I did in my old flat.

thedoc46 said:
I don't have any spare routers knocking around, so will need to buy an access point.. Any recommendations ?
Click to expand...

Get yourself along to a bootfair, I can almost guarantee you'll find someone flogging an old netgear router for a couple of quid that would do the job at least well enough for you to see if it totally solves the problem!!
 
UniFi ac APs are popular.

The router and the AP can have the same SSID/security/password, you just need to change sure thay are on non-conflicting channels (eg router is on 1, then AP will need to be set to 6 or 11).
 
In the past I had a router set up as an access point with the same SSID etc as my router which worked ok, but for android devices it was a bit of a pain as if the device was connected to the router it would stay connected to it even if the signal from the access point was stronger. To connect to the access point I had to switch wifi off and back on.

I've not tried it as yet but there's an app called Swifi which will automatically switch to the stronger signal but the access point needs a different SSID to the router.
 
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