Roofus
New Around Here
Hi all,
I'm helping my dad upgrade his wifi setup at his house to AC and need some advice on WAPs.
He has about 8,000 sq/ft to cover. Previously I had a WRT 54G router running DD-WRT in the basement where our incoming cable line comes in which networks to a switch in order to to have enough ports for all the ethernet we are running for wired devices throughout the house. This also covered the basement and much of the first floor area fine for wifi. In addition to this, I had 2 old routers that I had plugged into ethernet wall outlets in second floor area on either side of the house with DHCP turned off, and static IP addresses assigned in these old routers as well as reserving those IPs in the basement router via MAC address. This covered the entire house with N quite well.
In an attempt to upgrade him to AC, I recently replaced the main router with an Linksys EA6900, which again serves the basement quite well, and due to the smaller range hits the first floor to a lesser extent. I would like to do the same thing I had done previously with some WAPs stationed on the second floor.
While I was in town over the holidays I purchased a Linksys RE6500 Range Extender. However, what I discovered is that the bios is pretty locked down and connects to the router in such a way that it always pulls the settings from the router and will not allow me to set it up like I had done in with my N network model. Basically this device will only act as a range extender and not a true WAP. The problem is that forces the user to physically switch wifi connections on whatever client they are using as they move around the house in order to get the best signal.
Can any of you recommend a true 802.11AC WAP that is not too cost prohibitive in that I can setup with DHCP turned off and connected via ethernet that creates a true mesh network in order to allow the client to constantly retain a strong signal across the house while staying on the same SSID?
Thanks!
I'm helping my dad upgrade his wifi setup at his house to AC and need some advice on WAPs.
He has about 8,000 sq/ft to cover. Previously I had a WRT 54G router running DD-WRT in the basement where our incoming cable line comes in which networks to a switch in order to to have enough ports for all the ethernet we are running for wired devices throughout the house. This also covered the basement and much of the first floor area fine for wifi. In addition to this, I had 2 old routers that I had plugged into ethernet wall outlets in second floor area on either side of the house with DHCP turned off, and static IP addresses assigned in these old routers as well as reserving those IPs in the basement router via MAC address. This covered the entire house with N quite well.
In an attempt to upgrade him to AC, I recently replaced the main router with an Linksys EA6900, which again serves the basement quite well, and due to the smaller range hits the first floor to a lesser extent. I would like to do the same thing I had done previously with some WAPs stationed on the second floor.
While I was in town over the holidays I purchased a Linksys RE6500 Range Extender. However, what I discovered is that the bios is pretty locked down and connects to the router in such a way that it always pulls the settings from the router and will not allow me to set it up like I had done in with my N network model. Basically this device will only act as a range extender and not a true WAP. The problem is that forces the user to physically switch wifi connections on whatever client they are using as they move around the house in order to get the best signal.
Can any of you recommend a true 802.11AC WAP that is not too cost prohibitive in that I can setup with DHCP turned off and connected via ethernet that creates a true mesh network in order to allow the client to constantly retain a strong signal across the house while staying on the same SSID?
Thanks!
