Help with wireless network setup and topology (Apple wireless routers)

Factual Questions
1

I’m trying to help a friend of mine fix the wireless network setup in her house.

Here’s the current situation: The house is shaped vaguely like the letter U, and the cable internet comes in at the lower left corner (at the bend of the U). There’s a wireless router (which I’ll call R1) there, and two others that can be put wherever. All three are part of the same network (I don’t know the exact terminology, but there’s only one SSID that comes up).

The problem is that there’s very weak signal in the upper right corner. I put one other router (R2) in the lower right, with line-of-sight to the router connected to the cable, and that improves things a good bit in the upper right, but really only if you are standing at the end of the hallway (line of sight to R2). I tried putting R3 in the upper right of the U, line of sight to R2, but that made things way slower. My theory for why that’s happening is that R3, instead of connecting to R2, is connecting to R1 (which has a pretty weak signal in the upper right), which makes things way slower.

All these routers are Apple Airport thingies, and the laptops and devices connected to them are Apple brand as well. A few questions:

  1. What do you think of my theory that R3 makes things slower because it’s connecting to R1 rather than R2?

  2. How can I actually test that?

  3. Is there a way to force the topology in the router settings somewhere? I think if I gave them separate SSIDs, then I could at least tell which one I was connected to and tell it to connect to a specific other one, but maybe there’s a way to do it with one SSID, too (which would be ideal, since my friend is somewhat tech-phobic and the less I change, the better)

  4. What’s a good way to test throughput from router to router and from laptop to router? Apple has a “Network diagnostics” utility, but it creates two dozen different files and I can’t find much guidance on how to interpret them. I’ve been just using an internet speed test to test connection speed from my laptop, which is not ideal, since it introduces too many other variables. I’d like to just tell my laptop to do a test with the closest router.

Thanks!

2

Can you clarify, there is only one that is actually wired to the cable modem? That one is your ‘router’, the others need to be configured to be access points (wired in network with the router) or wireless extenders (not wired).

If they are wireless extenders then they will have to be communicating with the router R2<->R1 and R3<->R1, I don’t think there is a way to have things go R1<->R2<->R3. Also be aware that a wireless extender will be WAY slower than your main router or a wired access point.

3

Yes, only one connected to the cable (R1), so the others are just extending the network.

While I’m sure the extenders will be slower, the wireless network is way faster than the cable speed anyway, so I’m just trying to make the cable be the bottleneck rather than the have signal degradation be the problem. Just moving R2 to where it is (it was somewhere dumb) made a marked improvement.

If the topology I want isn’t possible, then so be it.

4

You might consider setting up a wired network over your electrical wires or coaxial (cable) wires.

5

Yeah, it looks like a wired network is the only reasonable solution here. Using the coax cable seems like the best bet at this point.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

6

If you set up R2 to “create a wireless network” and R1 and R3 to “extend a wireless network” you should see some improvement. However, now your network will be down if R2 doesn’t work.

Also, don’t put your base stations all the way in the corner or top/bottom floor. For instance, if you have floors 1 - 4 with R1 on floor 1, you’re better off putting R2 on floor 3 than on floor 4, as two mediocre hops is much better than one good one and one bad one.

Also note that the Airport Extreme and Time Capsule base stations have antennas on both sides and the front, so orient them so the antennas beam into useful directions and let the back face outside walls or metal. On lower floors, it can help to put the base station as high up as possible.

7

This turns out not to be the case, at least for Apple routers (and I expect for sufficiently advanced non-Apple routers.

In the Apple wireless configuration utility, you can clearly select which other router to extend, so you can set up the topology the way you want. I mention this in case someone in the future finds this thread.

I got some internet over coax bridge thingies that I’m planning to install to make things go even faster, but my original plan does appear to actually work (I haven’t tested it. I just saw the configuration option while setting up the other plan.).