My situation:
Upstairs: Networking closet. Closed doors, both to the closet and bedrooms.
Downstairs: Open, and I can position a router that will have decent line of sight to a fair amount of stuff, or maybe even two routers that should cover the whole floor. Downstairs routers can be connected via cable to the closet, so that's great (yay for me for running CAT6).
Until last week, I just used a one-router system: my old DLink dir-655 stuffed into the networking closet. Doesn't really reach the whole house very well, so I'm trying to fix that.
I just bought a TPLink Archer c7 ac1750 router, and for the time being have simply used it to replace the upstairs DLink. Coverage is better, but still not great, so I'd like to add an access point. I could use either my old dir-655 or the asus RT-N12/D1 (also just N300) that I just picked up for $10.
Here's the conundrum: It seems like stuffing the archer (dual band) into the closet upstairs is silly. It means the 5GHz band doesn't really get to play since there are lots of doors in the way. So does it make sense to use one of my "lesser" routers as the main router in the upstairs closet and use the brand-spanking new archer as a downstairs access point where at least some of the wireless devices might be able to take advantage of the 5Ghz band. Or do I really just need to buy another C7 archer and have a matched set.
New to all this, so sorry if this question is ignorant. Any/all help much appreciated. Thanks!
Upstairs: Networking closet. Closed doors, both to the closet and bedrooms.
Downstairs: Open, and I can position a router that will have decent line of sight to a fair amount of stuff, or maybe even two routers that should cover the whole floor. Downstairs routers can be connected via cable to the closet, so that's great (yay for me for running CAT6).
Until last week, I just used a one-router system: my old DLink dir-655 stuffed into the networking closet. Doesn't really reach the whole house very well, so I'm trying to fix that.
I just bought a TPLink Archer c7 ac1750 router, and for the time being have simply used it to replace the upstairs DLink. Coverage is better, but still not great, so I'd like to add an access point. I could use either my old dir-655 or the asus RT-N12/D1 (also just N300) that I just picked up for $10.
Here's the conundrum: It seems like stuffing the archer (dual band) into the closet upstairs is silly. It means the 5GHz band doesn't really get to play since there are lots of doors in the way. So does it make sense to use one of my "lesser" routers as the main router in the upstairs closet and use the brand-spanking new archer as a downstairs access point where at least some of the wireless devices might be able to take advantage of the 5Ghz band. Or do I really just need to buy another C7 archer and have a matched set.
New to all this, so sorry if this question is ignorant. Any/all help much appreciated. Thanks!