Having a total nightmare with wireless signal in my house

[joshhbk]

I live in Toronto, we recently upgraded from TekSavvy/Bell's 14/1 ADSL service to their 50/10 VDSL service. On the old line we had been running an old TP-Link N300 modem/router that while not amazing did a reasonable job of broadcasting signal to the rest of the house. Only the very back had problems so I got a plug in range extender for that.

Upon upgrading, however, we had to get a Sagemcom f@st 2864 modem which is, to put it lightly, a piece of crap. No problem I thought - I'll just get a router. First got a Linksys EA2700 which proved to have poor range, intermittent signal and terrible 2.4ghz performance. 5ghz was good but the range wasn't good enough. Exchanged it and got an EA6300 instead. Same deal as the 2700, so I did some more homework and decided to switch brands. Got the Asus N56U seeing as it has such good reviews and nobody has any Wireless AC devices in the house bar one Nexus 5. It's giving the same problems. Even in the same room as it my iPhone 5c and iPad 3 give rotten, inconsistent speeds and very high ping scores. By comparison, I have two jobs - one has an Airport Extreme in a densely populated office building (get full download and upload on my phone) and the other has a Netgear N300, same deal. Perfect.

My house mate's iPhone 5s and 15 month old Sony Vaio drop connection constantly from about 15 feet away. My 2012 MacBook Air gets 50 down and 10 up on 5ghz when in the same room as the router and 30/10 on the 2.4ghz network. When wired in with my Windows 8 desktop it's exactly as advertised.

I have tried every combination of settings, different firmware etc. I have used Innsider and moved around channels. I have tried just setting it to Wireless N, or mixed mode. Moved between 20mhz, 40 and auto. I took the mirror out of my room. Tried WPA Mixed, WPA Personal and even Open. I've turned on and off QoS and WMM. I've tried different firmware on each router. I've tried having the router in auto and bridge mode.

There is nobody in the area using the 5ghz signal, so it's not congestion. I could live with it if it was just the walls in my house blocking the signal but it makes no sense considering that the older TP Link was fine. Why is it absolutely perfect on my laptop but absolutely rotten on everything else? Why is a device that is championed for its range performing worse than a $40 old router?

I'm at work right now so I can't post any screens, but is there anything glaringly obvious about this that I'm doing wrong?

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Did you try different spot for the router? Central and higher location. Personally I
prefer routwers with external antenna.

 

[joshhbk]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I've tried it in each corner of the room yeah. I have it as high as the cables will allow and as close to the middle of the house as possible. For reference the old TP Link had been placed by my previous house mate on the floor and in the furthest corner. I was set on getting one with external Antenna but the Asus was so highly praised everywhere it seemed like a better call. It's baffling.

 

[messerchmidt]

if you are going to buy a new router, go netgear r7000. if you already have the asus rt66u, flash merlin wrt or ddwrt.


here is my solution. netgear r7000 + ddwrt + usb laptop cooling pad (for OC) + 12db dual band antennas.

these will also work on the asus rt66u,etc

http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-12dBi-RPS...osters_Extenders_Antennas&hash=item1e8a10bd81

Do not pay more thyan $8.00 shipping. What he charged me. I am in mississauga.

The sagem modem is a pile of junk. Turn off the wireless, use it as a dhcp and use another router as an access point.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

If you've tried 3 routers and your network still works poorly, then perhaps it's not the router. I have an RT-N56U and it worked great. It's on the shelf now as a spare.

Things to investigate are the cables used and the wireless methods (n preferable is being used). Then look into the big enchilada, the incoming service. Perhaps it's unstable and you're blaming the routers for a broken modem or a poor DSL connection. At this point, that's my guess. Stop spending money for a while and call the ISP techs in.

 

[RogerSC]

Nothing wrong with checking your incoming connection, but my experience with the Asus RT-N56U was pretty miserable on 5GHz. So much so that I couldn't stand it, and upgraded to the RT-N66U when I got serious about using 5GHz., which as great wireless coverage on the 5GHz. band. It's not expensive at this point (about $129 not on sale), so you might give that a try if you don't care about wireless-ac.

If you care about wireless-ac, then you could step up to something like an RT-AC56U (Tim Higgins, the reviewer here had good things to say about it), or even an Asus RT-AC66U or RT-AC68U or Netgear R7000 (as previously suggested). Any of these would be much more useful than the RT-N56U on 5GHz.

As you've noticed, you can return what doesn't work for you (thank goodness). We all try to do research on these things and pick the best router for our needs using the available specs, tests, and reviews, but one can be mislead by reviewers and users that really are over the top about a poor or mediocre router that isn't as great as they say *smile*. That happens too much, so having the right to return these is really essential.

 

[Stomper]

You can buy a box of 1km Cat6 cable for 60$, 10$ for 100 plug and 15$ the plier. On ebay witrh delivery included less than 100$

Then with 1km of cable you wire the entire house and put wifi router where you need wifi.

 

[sfx2000]

You can buy a box of 1km Cat6 cable for 60$, 10$ for 100 plug and 15$ the plier.

Don't forget the time and frustration on the learning curve of getting the correct wires on the connectors -- Priceless