Wifi Extenders

[TinCow]

I have something of a bad signal spot in my living room. It's not too bad, as the signal works about 75% of the time, but we're in that room a lot and our devices haves issues often enough to make it annoying. I'm considering buying a wifi extender to boost the strength in the room. However, after reading a bunch of reviews on newegg, it seems like pretty much every extender has two common complaints. First, it results in significantly lower data speeds. This is an issue because the wifi in the room is used heavily to stream HD content to our main television. I really don't want to slow that one down. Second, apparently its common for devices to have issues with trying to alternatively connect to the extender and the main router itself. This concerns me as the router signal is still moderately strong in the room and all devices will certainly see the original router and the extender. I do not want my devices losing connectivity because they are cycling back and forth between the router and the extender.

Does anyone have any advice on buying wifi extenders to deal with these concerns?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well a repeater is going to cut your bandwidth no matter what. You have to consider that for each bit of throughput transmitted, the network will have to send the same bit twice (once to the repeater and once from the repeater to the router). Since bandwidth is bits/sec, adding a single repeater halves your network bandwith.

There are two networking solutions to it: one install more APs & a switch. Two: install a better AP (i.e. better wireless router) with better penetration in the troublesome areas.

There's also the option of trying to see if you can move your AP to a better location (physically) to improve signal strength, switch frequency bands (to avoid the noisy neighbours) etc..

[TinCow]

A friendly neighborhood kilt-wearer informed me about powerline extenders. I had no idea those things even existed, and it appears they would meet my needs exactly so I'm probably going to go with those.

[Xiahou]

A friendly neighborhood kilt-wearer informed me about powerline extenders. I had no idea those things even existed, and it appears they would meet my needs exactly so I'm probably going to go with those.

Absolutely. Powerline networking is a great option. Get something like this. It gives you 2 units with 4 Ethernet ports at each end. I have 3 older powerline bridges in my current apartment. One is in my home office and has ethernet going into it from my home router. In our bedroom, I have another bridge that goes into a wireless AP. The third goes behind my entertainment center. I use that one to connect my PS3, Wii, Roku, and HTPC into the network over ethernet as opposed to wireless.

Back when I tried to take my consoles online via wireless, it was very frustrating if I had anything less than a perfect signal- lots of disconnects. That problem disappeared once I wired them in.

Now, bear in mind that while these kits advertise up to 200Mbps of thruput, that's really more of a theoretical maximum that's highly dependent on your electrical wiring and other factors. For me, my real thruput seems to be more in the 30 and 40 Mbps range. I have no complaints though, as that's more than adequate to stream Netflix and the like at HD quality and I'm also able to play DVD ISOs that are stored in my office on the HTPC without issue. Also, it's probably been over 5 years since I got my powerline bridges so I expect the quality has improved some over time....

Edit:
*** I thought I should stress the point that the kit I linked will not, by itself, give you extended wireless coverage. You'd need to add an additional wireless AP attached to the kit. Then configure it with the same ssid, security type and password, but a different wireless channel than your current wireless network. Then you'd be good to go.

[TinCow]

Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to do, though I'll be cruising the reviews at Newegg and Amazon before I pick a specific type. These actually solve my wifi problem as well for free. My ISP-provided router does wireless b/g, but not n. As a result I bought a wireless n bridge a while ago, and that's what powers my current wifi network. However, it has to be connected to the router, which itself has to be on the bottom floor of my house (three stories). With the powerline extenders, I can remove the N bridge and plug the router directly into the wall sockets. I'll then put the second extender at my media center in the living room, which is on the second floor, and move the N bridge there. That will not only let me wire up my media center for optimal speed, but it will also move my N Bridge to the middle floor of my house which should fix all of my wifi deadspot problems.

I'm positively giddy with anticipation. I feel like an absolute muppet for not even being aware these things existed.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well my only experience with powerline was something in rural France. Which was something that made 3G networking sound blazingly fast. Then again, rural France probably meant it was the standards compliant low speed stuff.

[Xiahou]

Well my only experience with powerline was something in rural France. Which was something that made 3G networking sound blazingly fast. Then again, rural France probably meant it was the standards compliant low speed stuff.

It sounds like you're talking about powerline Internet service. That never really took off here- probably with good reason. What we're talking about is powerline LAN networking.

@TinCow, let us know what model you end up going with. I'd be surprised if you find anything better than the Western Digital ones though...

[TinCow]

I bought the 4-port version of this one, though I bought it through Newegg. It arrived and I installed it yesterday. So far, it is superb. It could not be simpler to use, just plug the single port transmitter into an outlet near the router, and connect with cat-5. Then plug the 4-port receiver in wherever you want to extend the network, in my case behind my media center in the living room. So far I've only hooked up my TiVo to it, but there's already been a significant improvement. I used to stream to the TiVo via WiFi (Wireless N) which wasn't bad, but if I was transferring a 1080p blu-ray rip from my fileserver I would sometimes need to give it an hour headstart or I'd run out of buffer. Netflix generally streamed perfectly fine, but at the start of any video the quality was extremely bad and it took about 20 seconds to get up to snuff. Netflix also occasionally experienced some video degradation or stoppages during play, though not enough to really irk me.

With the powerline extender installed instead of wifi, I was able to watch a 1080p blu-ray rip from my fileserver with only 2 minutes of buffering, which is a massive improvement. Netflix also streamed perfectly with only minor visual degradation for the first 5 seconds or so, and no degradation or stoppages during about 3 hours of playback. I've not yet moved my N bridge to the extender, as I need to dig a spare router out of storage to use as a hub in its place. I've got 4 devices wired into the N bridge at the moment and can't lose those connections.

So far I'm very pleased with the system, and the modular nature of the product is very nice. I can expand the network simply by buying more of the things, be they the 1 port, 4 port, or WiFi models.

[Xiahou]

I should've known I pretty much jinxed myself by talking about how reliable and great my setup was....
Thursday night, the network connection running to my entertainment center deteriorated to somewhere between cripplingly slow and non-existent.

I ended up losing all synchronization between my powerline bridges and spending hours trying to figure out why, while two of them synced immediately, the third was refusing to come online. The odd thing was that it was the bridge that used to be in the bedroom that wouldn't sync. I put the living room one back, but the speeds were still on par with dialup.

So... after upgrading the firmware on the units, taking two of them apart and many other futile efforts, I finally realized the original problem was that the 5 port switch I had behind my entertainment center was going bad. Once I replaced that, the connection was fantastic.

I eventually got the third bridge working by figuring out the magical combination of button presses. Hold the button for 10 seconds to do a factory reset and wait 2 minutes for it to come back up. Then press the button for two seconds to get it in pairing mode- then, quickly run to a synced bridge and hold its button for two seconds as well. Then they all synced up and everything was right with the world again.

Even better, the firmware upgrades seem to have improved my connection speeds a but. I'm now running between 60-70 Mbps on the connections!