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I am having trouble getting wifi in all areas of the house. my wife seems to think the best thing is some kind of mesh system. i pointed out that all rooms are hardwired with cat5 wiring. so i thought the best thing to do was put some kind of router in some rooms to be attached to the wiring in the house (i have no idea of what i am talking about but that seems logical to me). she says that is an obsolete concept and you cant do that easily because you would be setting up multiple networks in the house to log into.
so are either of us right and if not what is the best way to do it.
You can also use the electrical wiring in your house to run high speed range extenders that plug into your router on one end, and plug into a wall outlet on the other.
My take (last job was as the head of an IT dept that oversaw 6 buildings), you want wireless access points plugged into the physical CAT5/5e/6 network going back to the main router. Those WAPs should share an SSID (so you have proper handoff, just like with your cell phone where it works as you drive down the interstate). Depending on the devices connected, you could simply buy a few $25 wireless routers (https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Wirel...+Wireless+N300) ~ those are "only" 802.11 N, where AC is the most current standard, but N is more than good enough for the Vast majority of homes.
The only real difference is that the "mesh" network will try to guide the device to the strongest source... thing is, most Devices have a way for it to simply use the strongest source built into the settings.
Regardless, you can probably have total home coverage for $25~50 by using the existing ethernet with zero degradation in speeds, but it requires a smidge of know-how (or google-fu). Or you can buy a "mesh" system for $250~500 that are plug and play (ish) that will probably suffer a little on throughput if it's completely wireless.
We have steel beams in our house.
So, we have 1 Apple Airport Extreme in our office. And, 3 Apple Airport Expresses just plugged into electrical outlets.
Single network. Works for music, web access and Apple TV.
Was trivial to set up.
Guess I'm lucky. My boyfriend and I live in 1500 sf houses right next door to each other. Not only does my wireless extend to my entire home, but if I am having trouble I can get on his wireless with no problems (and vice versa). We just have ordinary wireless routers with no additional range extenders.
Too bad, you had the right idea. You get multiple access points (not routers), connect to the wired network, set them to the same SSID, done. I have three in my house.
Too bad, you had the right idea. You get multiple access points (not routers), connect to the wired network, set them to the same SSID, done. I have three in my house.
could you link me an example of one of these products on amazon?
would i expect this to provide me with a substantially better wifi coverage than with that google wifi thing?
I haven't used the Google Wifi thing but in general I've found that wireless extenders don't work as well as wired ones.
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