Advice on a setup for a house.

[fenrry]

Hi, I'm trying to help a friend and family to get a better network experience, the house is as shown on the attachment, the DSL modem/gateway is located on the basement and I have pc's on the basement, main room and secondary rooms.

So prior to this experiment I had a Wrt160nv2 connected to the Dsl m/g and I was pushing signal upstairs on the N band, I got a desktop connected to the DSL m/g and 2 laptops on the main and secondary rooms, now on the 160N there is no way to select the channel and the signal is rather jumpy upstairs on the main room where they are using a laptop to watch tv from the web, it was ok but as of late is has become a nightmare since for what I gathered today there is few new networks around.

In any case today I bought a new N56U and I set the router as replacement to the 160N, huge improvement, using inSSIDer I selected channel 9 on the 2.4G freq and 44 on the 5G, yet I was not able to see the 5G network anywhere.

Now, I was thinking if instead of using the N56U as a replacement for the 160N, would it be a better idea to use it as a bridge and set it on the living room, what you guys think?

Also and I'm a bit confused about using the same SSID on the 2.4 and 5G freqs, should I rename the 5G to something else or is it ok to leave it as is, based on what I read it doesn't really matter as long as the wireless adapter is only compatible with 2.4 only (probable reason why I can't c the 5G network anywhere), or should I just disable it and save some energy?, be a bit more eco friendly since there is no use for 5G on this equation.

So any thoughts or ideas and suggestions are very welcome, thx!

 

[wfines]

The answers to your questions are in topics on the front page of this forum. But anyways:

Windows will only report the highest signal strength SSID it sees when more than one identical SSID exists in the environment. You must change it, unless you want to risk not having a clear understanding of which devices are connecting to which radio and all of the negative consequences that entails.

Remember: 5ghz is almost always LESS range than 2.4ghz. 5ghz just happens to avoid all the other 2.4ghz devices, which are plentiful.

As for the bridge idea: You tell us! Hows your coverage? If you have dead spots, I think you answered your own question. It can't hurt to try. If you aren't experiencing issues, the second AP may hinder more than help.

 

[thiggins]

Rather than messing with wireless bridging. I would try a pair of HomePlug AV 200 Mbps or 500 Mbps adapters to connect your remote access point to your main router.