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?
As others have said, repeaters are pretty garbage for extending wifi. Even mesh systems are nothing compared to multiple APs connected with ethernet.
For hardware if possible, I’d try to stick to using proper APs and not just reused wireless routers so that you can ensure the radio settings are properly matched automatically or manually. I prefer Ubiquiti, but they’re on the pricier side. You can get something way cheaper so long as it has configurable radio settings.
When using multiple APs, you wanna make sure that the newer standards for device roaming are on, and that they are running the same WiFi network. Make sure any repeater or AP to AP wireless function stays off.
Best thing to do is whip out the wifiman app and look at the channel map which will show you what frequency your WiFi devices are running at, as well as any overlap with other people’s routers. Assuming you’ve taken out the repeaters, the packet loss will then most likely occur from overlapping SSIDs.
Now APs are supposed to pick the most empty channel possible, but lots of times they suck at it or are just overcongested (ex: apartments). This is where you can manually configure channels to eliminate overlap.
In my personal experience, you can just consider 2.4Ghz a lost cause and leave it on auto. There’s only 3 non overlapping channels, so there’s just no chance you’ll ever get a solid signal unless you live like a solid half mile away from your neighbor.
For 5Ghz, you get a ton of more room and bandwidth to play with. Once you feel comfortable playing with the channel settings, you will discover the super secret DFS channels if you live in the US. Those channels can interfere with weather satellite data, so you should totally never use them because its not like our current administration has been budget cutting the national weather service or anything.
If you want to have some extra fun, spin up Kali linux on a laptop or anything with WiFi and run bettercap to see the inevitable smart home or IoT device spamming the airwaves causing even more packet loss.
EDIT:
If you’re on a tight budget, you can reuse the routers that you have, just know that you might not be able to change the channel settings depending on the router, and that AP to AP roaming will rely on your client devices to work, which can be a mixed bag sometimes.