Need recommendations on gigabit wireless extender (will be wired in)

[bascotie]

Hi guys,

Just wanna say I've loved this site from the moment I found it. It's helped me with a few jobs so far in finding great products.

I have a situation in which I'm not sure I should just go out and buy something just yet, without proper advice.

At home, I have a gigabit router in one room which is hooked up to our modem. From the router, it goes to a WRT54GL somewhere in the middle of the house that has been setup with DD-WRT as an extender with the same wireless SSID.

It works fine and dandy (most of the time), but I wanted to get something faster. There's a kid upstairs who games and occasionally lags up a bit (our backbone was recently upgraded to 100Mbps/10Mbps).

Also, from the extender we wire in a device for streaming media across the lan and if we go above 720p, it tends to lag in playback.

Do you guys have any recommendations, if any, for something that will speed up our lan backbone, as well as offering a strong enough wireless signal to minimize loss upstairs and throughout the house? Of course, again, it will be acting as a wireless extender. Thank you

 

[messerchmidt]

netgear r7000 with ddwrt

 

[bascotie]

netgear r7000 with ddwrt

Thanks. I've been looking at that router and wondering if I should just replace the router I have with that one alone and it might be enough? The signal almost covers the whole house already but i put in an extender because of the occasional drop

 

[stevech]

better coverage = adding one or more WiFi access points (APs). Not trying to get more coverage at router - as WiFi is TWO-WAY. A thousand watt router (illegal of course) won't fix a weak client-to-router signal.

I use this, in AP mode, for handhelds on the 1st floor here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320168&cm_re=rt_n12-_-33-320-168-_-Product

reliable. Faster than my ISP data rates.

 

[bascotie]

better coverage = adding one or more WiFi access points (APs). Not trying to get more coverage at router - as WiFi is TWO-WAY. A thousand watt router (illegal of course) won't fix a weak client-to-router signal.

I use this, in AP mode, for handhelds on the 1st floor here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320168&cm_re=rt_n12-_-33-320-168-_-Product

reliable. Faster than my ISP data rates.

Thanks Steve. Does that extender allow you to use the same SSID across routers?

EDIT: One more question, Steve. You mentioned communication being two way and that clients still need to reach the router. The way I've always seen this, as an example, is an adult reaching to a baby. The adult has a much longer reach, and the baby doesn't. Even then, as long as the adult is reaching out, the baby can reach back for the adult. Does wireless not work the same way?

So if your router can reach your upstairs bedroom, when it's time for the client computer to communicate back, won't it be able to reach back into that signal the router is emitting to get the word back to the router?

 

[jegesq]

I would replace both the router and the AP, buy two AC68's, connect one to the modem (i.e., run one as a router), and then either connect the second by Gig Ethernet using Cat5e or Cat6 and use as AP, or just connect the second one wirelessly via the 5ghz channel and run it as a repeater (that way you receive the 5ghz channel and pass it through to your wired media streaming device with minimal loss of the original signal and speed), and you can still rebroadcast that channel on both the 2.4 and 5.0 ghz radios on the repeater, thus giving you better coverage in areas that the router's own wireless might not reach optimally.

This is essentially the setup I use (except that I'm using two AC66's, which today is cheaper by about $60 than using two AC68's) and I get great coverage, great upload and download speeds, and I am able to consistently stream 1080P content off the repeater to a wired HTPC without any lag or stutter/jitter whatsoever.

Like you, I also connect additional devices to the second unit, the repeater (via the Gig Ethernet ports) that I use for streaming media. This setup works great, it's reliable and I love the AC66's and Merlin's FW. If I were setting it up again today, I'd either buy two AC68's (each is about $30 more than the 66's, but they are dual CPU's so are a bit quicker than the 66's), or I'd do it with one AC68 (as a repeater) and use an AC87 as the router.

I have no experience with any of the recent Netgear AC routers/AP's, but I'm sure you can't go wrong with the R7000, but from what I've seen, I don't know how you'd fare with just that device or whether there's a reliable combo repeater/AP/bridge unit that would work well with it.

While you don't mention it, as Steve also said, none of this is going to fix or improve a bad connection from your ISP or a slow internet connection. I'm pretty fortunate now that TimeWarner has jacked up our speeds to 300down/20up, as it's really helped with streaming.

 

[bascotie]

I would replace both the router and the AP, buy two AC68's, connect one to the modem, and then either wire the second one in as an AP, or just connect it wirelessly as a repeater.

This is essentially the same setup I have (but I'm using two AC66's, so if you went that route it would be a bit cheaper by about $60) and I get great coverage, great speeds, and am able to consistently stream 1080P content without any lag or stutter/jitter.

Like you, I also connect additional devices to the second unit, the repeater (via the Gig Ethernet ports) that I use for streaming media. This setup works great, it's reliable and I love the AC66's and Merlin FW. If I were doing this today, I'd either buy two AC68's, or one AC68 and an AC87. I have no experience with the recent Netgear routers/AP's, but I'm sure you can't go wrong with the R7000 either if you were to replace your router.

While you don't mention it, as Steve also notes, none of this is going to fix or improve a bad connection from your ISP or a slow internet connection.

Thanks, that sounds like a good setup. Were you able to use the same SSID across both APs?

 

[jegesq]

Sorry, I was editing my post as you were replying....I didn't change much in it, but added a bit.

Anyway, to answer your question, no you want to use separate SSID's so you know which one you're connecting to, and can tweak performance. I just use the standard default "ASUS" (2.4) and "ASUS_5G" (5 ghz) on the router, and "ASUS_2nd" and "ASUS 5G2nd" for the repeater. Never any issue or problems.

 

[bascotie]

Sorry, I was editing my post as you were replying....I didn't change much in it, but added a bit.

Anyway, to answer your question, no you want to use separate SSID's so you know which one you're connecting to, and can tweak performance. I just use the standard default "ASUS" (2.4) and "ASUS_5G" (5 ghz) on the router, and "ASUS_2nd" and "ASUS 5G2nd" for the repeater. Never any issue or problems.

So your devices roam automatically to the best available connection?

 

[jegesq]

Both my wife and I use Samsung Galaxy S5's and they seem to switch to whichever 5 ghz is strongest, so I guess in that sense, they "roam". Obviously our two laptops do not, but I mostly use mine upstairs in the bedroom (in which case I'm on the "ASUS 5G" upstairs). I use an Asus USB-AC53 adapter in my HP laptop, which only has a really crappy Ralink wireless b/g/n nic...with the AC53 I can connect to the 5ghz channel with AC at between 830and 720 mbps...which in the real world gets me around like 50+ on large file transfers over the network, and at least 250+ download from the internet). I'm using the laptop downstairs in the den (which is where the repeater is located), I just switch to "ASUS 5G2d" depending on what I'm doing, e.g., if I need more speed. But for the most part with my laptop, I could stay connected to the upstairs router if need be since I get decent coverage almost everywhere in the house, just not top speeds at the fringes of the router's coverage and thus I switch it manually when I'm downstairs..Not a big deal. My wife's laptop is usually in the bedroom, and so she stays logged on to the upstairs router; her desktop is located in a back bedroom downstairs, and it's got an AC dual band wireless NIC pre-installed, so it connects wirelessly to the repeater, as does an HP Deskjet and a SmartTV located in her office. Upstairs I have several FreeNas servers, another HP Deskjet, a Win8 Server, and an old XP machine, all wired to the router with Gigabit Ethernet (and with a separate Gigabit switch), and another SmartTV. In another downstairs bedroom we have a Wii, a Slingbox (one of our sons is in Toronto, the other is in Israel and they both use it regularly to get programming they can't see where they are, at least not live) which connects to the upstairs router (the bedroom is located directly downstairs from the router so it's closer than the repeater) using a Netgear WNCE2001 media adapter (which I'll be replacing shortly with something faster and more reliable), and another desktop connected wirelessly (using another AC USB dongle). All of this stuff connects and works flawlessly, and every device and computer on the network can access the shares (the FreeNASes and Win8 Server) for music, files, and movies. No trouble streaming 1080p and even Blu-Ray rips.

Both the 5ghz router and repeater need to be on the same channel, and after using Inssider and several other tools, I find that 161 is the cleanest and best channel to be on since there are no other conflicting routers anywhere on our block that use that channel. And since at the moment there's no one in our area using anything in the upper bands, I'm using the 80mhz setting for the channel width (yeah, it would be anti-social if there was anyone else on those upper bands, but there isn't so I don't worry about it). On the 2.4 ghz channel, we have a neighbor who idiotically set his router to channel 7, so he overlaps with channel 6 (which seems to be the busiest in our neighborhood), but thankfully we're the only ones using channels 1 and 11. So all is good.

Our two sons are grown and no longer living at home, but when they visit, one is an Apple-holic (multiple i-phones, multiple macs for business and personal), and the other is an Android/Windows/Linux guy, and they never have any issues getting great coverage anywhere in the house. And of course, the AC66's (and the 68's and 87's) have the ability to set up at least two different "Guest" networks with secured logins, and I often set that up when we know we're having a lot of people over for dinner, drinks or social events.

But for the most part, the majority of our devices other than laptops, phones and tablets are pretty much stationary (e.g., desktops, printers, smart TV's, HTPC, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players, Wii, X-Box360, Roku, Chromecast, Fire TV, etc.) and they don't need to automatically switch between the router and the repeater. We have several tablets (including a Windows Surface that I love) and they do need to be manually switched since they don't detect which signal is strongest, and we do that from time to time, depending where we are using them in the house.

But I find this router-repeater set up to be very workable, and it provides really solid and stable coverage everywhere on our property. It's a very flexible set up and best of all, it didn't cost too much to get it up and running.

 

[azazel1024]

So your devices roam automatically to the best available connection?

Generally, No, devices will not unless they lose a connection. Client based roaming only switches SSIDs if the signal pretty much bottoms out.

In windows you can change settings (usually) so that your windows device will look at other networks when evaluating signal strength for roaming (IE it'll roam to other networks). Otherwise windows and most other OS treat different SSIDs as different networks and will not roam to them unless the existing network connection is lost, or occasionally becomes very weak.

You need same name for all APs if you want decent roaming (just keep in mind, roaming without controller/AP directed fast hand-off occasionally breaks things. Like Facetime, other things like loading webpages, VOIP sometimes, streaming video, etc. generally will work resonable seamlessly or only mild seams).

 

[bascotie]

I appreciate the help, thanks!