I’m familiar with the absolute basics of networking, but very little surrounding wifi.
I’m current using the modem-router-AP provided by my ISP, along with a couple repeaters. This isn’t working well, and in areas of my house further away from my main AP, packet loss is often around 20% - near unusable. How should I improve this?
I can run some wires (within reason), and have multiple spare routers-APs to work with. I can also buy something new off the shelf if needed, but don’t want to spend more than I have to. What would be the approach I should use? Like, is there a particular type of extender I should be using, or can I use multiple routers as a mesh or something?
Bought an Asus Mesh wifi system for my 1,800 sq. ft house. Put them on opposite ends and I don’t have a single corner with bad coveragge. I feel confident it would still for work well for a much bigger house. I had done a little research and this was what I came up with as the best quality for the price. I had to watch a YouTube walk through to set it up but it’s not overly complicated as long as you’re patient. Could probably find the video if you ended up needing it.
Don’t judge me I did buy it off Amazon but it was well before the election and boycotts. https://a.co/d/0dOCQqFM
There are lots of good suggestions here, but I found that putting my access point up high helped immensely. I did it when painting a room and noticed better coverage in places that were not so good before.
Ditch the repeaters. Unless you have a mansion, or a bunker, that sounds like the effect of WiFi congestion rather than distance. Repeaters mean that each packet has to hit the air twice, or more, increasing congestion. Deploy multiple APs around the house, and run ethernet cabling to them from the ISP’s router. Configure all the APs with the same SSID, and security settings, and client devices can roam freely between them.
This is The Way.
Repeaters are awful. It’s best to have multiple access points instead. One simple solution is to deactivate wifi in your ISPs router, and add your own APs instead, possibly via a switch.
I ran some cables throughout my house and bought a 3-pach of Aruba AP22. Wired them into a PoE switch, which in turn connects to my router (I managed to replace my ISPs router, but that’s besides the point). Works like a charm.
Repeaters don’t work, especially on newer Wifi clients. You need a proper Mesh system to cover a larger area. Probably going to run you $300-$500USD for a 3 AP kit.
You’ll need to put that junky AP they sent you from the ISP into Passthrough Mode, hook up the new AP from the Mesh system as your new router, then just place the other new APs in mesh mode as you want them.
So there isn’t really a good option, other than buying an off-the-shelf mesh system?
Edited to a bit more. See my other comment.
We can’t see your house, to it’s hard to give you very many options except the simplest.
You will more than likely need more hardware though.
Instead of chaining them together, try to put the “router” in a central location and do what’s needed to limit your repeaters to a single hop away from the router. Chaining them together will lead to problems.
A proper mesh system will work better than repeaters. Some systems can use powerline networking to use your existing power outlets as a network, but it’s not always that great.
Some locations such as apartments/condos have really bad interfering neighbors on 2.4ghz. If that’s your situation then using 5ghz exclusively might help.
I’m seconding SwingTheLamp@piefed.zip 's comment, but would begin with 1 step below that:
simply find the best location in the house for having a good ( not your ISP’s, unless it actually is a good MIMO router ) wifi-router, with no AP’s or any other radios, & see how that works, 1st.
IF there are areas that won’t work, THEN do the wire+AP thing, as required.
hth!
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Good point!
