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I have a two story condo that is fairly long from east to west, (about 2200sq ft). I have Comcast's Extreme 150 Mbps speed via their latest modem.
My NETGEAR R7800 Nighthawk X4S AC2600 Smart WiFi MU-MIMO Gigabit Router with additional 5 GHz DFS channels is by necessity located upstairs at the eastern most part. Two of the bedrooms downstairs are at the western most part of the condo. Needless to say, even with this top of the line router, the signal strength is weak in those two rooms.
I have considered buying a range extender, knowing that signal strength will improve, but the speed will only be as fast as my slowest component. So I am looking at the Netgear Nighthawk X4 AC2200 WiFi Range Extender (EX7300) to put downstairs to solve the problem. Trouble is, I am not sure if users will have a seamless switch from the router to the the extender, or will they need to log into the Extender when far away from the router?
What about using another AC router to boost the signal as a repeater?
I think the only problem with that would be the need to have it hardwired with a Lan from the router upstairs, right?
Or, should I consider getting a TP-Link Deco M5 Whole-Home Wi-Fi System?
I suspect it is not as fast, but supposedly has an easy to set up system and very food coverage.
You did not mention what devices you use on Wifi. 2200 SF does not seem that big and depending on what internet speed you get it may not matter. In other words, the speed of your router may far surpass your internet speed so you will never get faster for online activities. If you are streaming from a home server it may matter. AC is plenty fast and alread has a great range. You could do a speedtest. There are also apps available for smartphones that will tell you the signal strength of your Wifi.
The R7800 is a beast with 1 watt of transmit power, so you could make the most of it with a Wi-Fi-over-coax setup. The Coaxifi project on Kickstarter has a low-loss Wi-Fi splitter that sends Wi-Fi signals in every band over your condo's coaxial cabling. You'd just thread their kit on an R7800 antenna connector, put their high-gain antennas on the unused cable outlets, and then the signals essentially walk through the walls of your house. The advantage over "Wi-Fi over Wi-Fi" meshes and extenders is that there's no ping delay due to routing between access points, no loss in bandwidth due to channel congestion between APs, and no hidden node interference caused by APs. You also don't need to rewire your house like you would with Cat5e-fed UniFi units. Should eat through concrete fairly well.
Trouble is, I am not sure if users will have a seamless switch from the router to the the extender, or will they need to log into the Extender when far away from the router?
I agree that 2200 square feet does not sound that large. Is it 50' by 44' ?
I prefer a low tech solution, as a wifi net which can cost hundreds of dollars.
My home is 56' by 73' and the walls are lathe and plaster (construction from the late 1920's). So even the most powerful router won't cover the entire home.
I run a Cat5e cable from the modem to the router & WiFi access point on one end of the home. It is connected to three television cable set top boxes (I found out that the cable boxes really work best if connected to one router). The remaining port has a Cat5e cable that runs to the other end of the house and a $20 switch.
From the switch, I have more devices plugged in (two computers, one Roku, and a second wireless access point).
I use the same network name and passwords on both routers. If I carry a phone or a tablet from one end of the house to the other, I must turn off the WiFi and then turn it back on again. That makes the phone switch from one router to the other.
You might ask yourself if you really need wifi at both ends of the home. If not then just a switch might do the job.
Last edited by PacoMartin; 06-07-2017 at 11:02 AM..
Instead of having the existing router at one end of the condo, can you relocate it to a more central location, and then run an Ethernet cable between it and the existing modem ?
Instead of having the existing router at one end of the condo, can you relocate it to a more central location, and then run an Ethernet cable between it and the existing modem ?
That is an excellent suggestion. You don't have to put the router near the modem.
I use the same network name and passwords on both routers. If I carry a phone or a tablet from one end of the house to the other, I must turn off the WiFi and then turn it back on again. That makes the phone switch from one router to the other..
The correct way to setup wifi in this scenario would be to configure your second router as an access point (AP), give it the same SSID and login but set it to a different channel. Your devices should roam and automatically connect to the router/AP with the strongest signal.
The real problem is none of the aforementioned setups will let devices roam freely between access points. You need a Mesh system that MLSFan mentioned. Could have been a bit more helpful, brother. These are getting popular... and cheaper.
The real problem is none of the aforementioned setups will let devices roam freely between access points. You need a Mesh system that MLSFan mentioned. Could have been a bit more helpful, brother. These are getting popular... and cheaper.[/url]
Coaxifi (Wi-Fi over coax) lets you roam freely throughout the house since it's a distributed antenna system (just like the DAS architecture used by cellular companies in urban areas), so the client devices don't need to re-register/re-home. You effectively turn the rooms of your house into one single antenna on the exact same SSID broadcast from the router.
As far as extenders and meshes go, unless you specifically see a mesh system offering 802.11k & 802.11r "Fast Roaming," your client device won't be automatically re-homed. What happens is you get re-homed to the same SSID on a different access point *only* when the RSSI from one AP is at the noise floor. So you basically need your signal on one AP to drop to 0% before your smartphone/laptop/tablet/etc. starts trading auth frames with the closer AP. This is super-inefficent. Ubiquiti UniFi and some other enterprise APs have this, but by God, you'll pay premium for it.
A mesh *topology* also seems like a bad idea if you want to manage your latency at all. Instead of 1 hop from router to client, a mesh could be multiple hops from client to AP 1 to AP 2 to router. What you want is point to point (like Coaxifi), or at least a star topology.
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