We installed them with tremendous success in my mother’s house. She has a ranch house. The internet and Wi-Fi is in the very front. I do not remember the exact model of Netgear Wi-Fi repeater that we purchased but each one was under $100. The first one boosted the signal in the middle of the house and the second one boosted the signal all the way back in her bedroom. They were not very complicated to set up. They only have to be readdressed if she loses power in the house. Otherwise they do exactly what they should.
If we lived in your basic Suburban home with a backyard, I would have an extender installed near an upstairs window facing towards the back yard. It would blanket the whole area with our Wi-Fi and make it easy to use outside.
I’m still interested in wifi mesh as a concept, but this seems to have solved the problem.
When they set the new router up they put it on the floor. I read online you should put it up higher, so I put the router on the top shelf of the computer desk instead. Now it seems to work fine even 50’ from the router, I’m getting good speeds and streaming services like hulu and amazon are working now. Before I was getting timeout errors and low speeds on speedtest in the room furthest from the computer room.
I used to do it all myself with older routers acting as wireless access points and running open source firmware (remember the venerable wrt-54g?).
I did the same for my home print server, using an old router for the job. The gateway was a single-board-computer running m0n0wall, then later on pfsense.
It all worked pretty well, and I had this setup for about a decade, but it required way too much care and feeding.
Then I went to a mesh system (Eero) and never looked back. It takes care of itself, everything just works…perfectly. I get wifi in my back yard, there are no funky dropouts in the house. Pretty awesome.
I own a Tp-Link Deco system. Was way cheaper than a Google, eero, etc unit and works great. I got the kit with 3 pucks. We regularly have multiple netflix/youtube and other wifi devices going with no issues handing off, etc.
I would recommend it over the others if you are budget conscious.
Wifi extenders are garbage. One major issue that has been vaguely covered in the above posts is that wifi extenders don’t increase the size of your current network, they actually create an ADDITIONAL network in your house.
So your normal network is “CubsfanNet” and the extender connects to that network and creates a second network called “CubsfanNet2”. That sounds like it’s no big deal but it’s actually really shitty. What happens is you’ll be in your livingroom where CubsfanNet signal is strong and walk downstairs into the basement where your extender is located. CubsfanNet2 is really strong down there, but your device is still connected to CubsfanNet because, even though the signal isn’t amazing it is still there. So your device will fuck around for a while with the bullshit connection even though Net2 is right there. Eventually your device may switch to Net2, but it doesn’t happen quickly and may not happen at all depending on just how strong Net1 is. So you manually switch your device to Net 2 and all is good, until you go back upstairs into your living room and the same thing happens in reverse. It is extremely annoying.
A Mesh avoids all of this. There is one network name and your device will switch to whichever node has the strongest signal. No muss no fuss. This wasn’t clear to me until I bought wifi extenders/repeaters a few years back.
Here’s a question for the group. I’m trying to set up a network in a vacation place that uses a phone hotspot as the internet connection, but allows devices to connect to a better wifi signal in areas away from the phone.
First thought is a wifi extender that will attach to my normal phone wifi network and create the additional (hopefully more powerful) wifi network that everyone else can connect to. But the mention of a mesh network has me curious if that could work as well.
@Cheesesteak Let’s clarify first: the main access point (the thing broadcasting a wifi signal) will be an actual phone? If so, will it always be the same phone acting as the primary access point? Also, what kind of phone?
It’s an iPhone 6S, my wife’s phone with the “unlimited” data plan. When the linked device or computer is near the phone, we have passable internet, but once you stray a small distance it goes all to hell. So, if Kid Cheesesteak wants to watch a video, my wife’s phone follows him, to the annoyance of Mrs. Cheesesteak.
My phone is a company phone, so I’m not going to use it as a personal hotspot. If it’s a 6S problem, I could be convinced to upgrade to a new model.
Look online for a lightning USB OTG ethernet adapter. Theoretically, you could pass an Ethernet cable from the phone into the WAN port of a mesh unit and it’ll work normally.
Mesh is just an upgraded standard for extenders. The only benefit of a traditional extender over mesh systems is the ability to create a separate wireless network with its own name and password for the area around the extender. With that said, a lot of mesh systems can also broadcast a single guest network with a separate name and password, but it’ll be available everywhere.
This is an interesting thread to me because I bought a really nice Nighthawk wireless router last fall and installed it in a central location in an attic. Works great. But this summer has seen a lot of 90+ temps and it gets to be a million degrees in there. So I moved the router to a cooler location, but it’s on the other side of my house from my home office. I have a wired connection to my main work computer, but I use wireless devices too, and the signal is ok but a little weak.
I was thinking about getting an extender until I saw this thread. But I don’t want to replace my relatively new Nighthawk with an equally expensive mesh system. The powerline adapter solution may be for me; I wasn’t aware of that option. Like I say, my signal isn’t too bad, I’d just like a bit of a boost.
I recently purchased a “NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Tri-Band Mesh Wi-Fi System (3-Pack)”. It was quite expensive at $300 but I’ve been fairly impressed by how well it works. The extender issue with the different access point names is frustrating.
I initially got it because I was using the upstairs guest room as a work from home office and our WiFi signal upstairs was terrible. Ordinarily I didn’t care about that because its just the kid’s bedrooms and the guest room. I’ve been impressed by it. It’s seamless and I get reliably fast internet (~400Mbps) everywhere in the house.
I’ve since moved downstairs into the actual office which somewhat subverted the point of the purchase, but it still works well. I like that I can plug wired ethernet items into any of the nodes, something that is useful for the surround sound receiver we have that is far away from the main router and doesn’t support WiFi (AirPlay streaming music to it from the phone works great now).
I edit video, so I’m one of only a handful of people at my organization that uses a desktop, a pretty expensive one that’s less than 2 years old. What no one knew before the pandemic because I always am hard wired in the office, is that somehow this computer they spent thousands of dollars on isn’t actually equipped with a wifi card. So, for the first several weeks of working from home while I worked on setting up a home office in my parents’ former bedroom, I had to run a wire from the modem to the computer. It sucked.
Once I moved into my new office I bought a $60 powerline adapter and it’s great.
A USB wifi adapter should work in that situation too. I know you solved your issue but on my old laptop sometimes the wifi would stop working and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So I got a USB wifi adapter and that worked to get me connected.