First of all, I guess…do they really work?
Secondly, where should a signal booster be place for optimal performance?
Halfway betwixt the router and the laptop?
More toward the router? More toward the laptop?
mmm
I bought a $30 Netgear wifi range extender EX2700 last June. It was very easy to get set up, and works well. I have it plugged into an outlet that is almost as far away in my house as it can physically get from the router, located on the opposite side of the house. I was trying to get a more reliable signal in my attached garage, and it was a great success. The speed is roughly halved from the speed you’d get connecting to the wifi router itself, but still more than plenty in my case.
If the electricity goes out momentarily, I have noticed that to regain a connection I may sometimes have to turn the unit of and on again to get it to reconnect to my router, but that’s a minor issue for me.
I honestly wasn’t expecting it to work, and I was pleasantly surprised.
WiFi signal boosters work by extending range at the cost of speed. They typically use the same channels to talk to the router (“backhaul”) that they use to talk to your laptop. So they cut bandwidth by a little more than half. For basic web browsing and email, though, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The position question can only be answered experimentally. You need to balance the signal between the extender and the router against the signal between the extender and your laptop. As a first approximation, I’d go with the extender position that gives the best results on a speed test web site.
The answer is almost always going to depend on where the electrical outlets are. So as far away from the router as possible such that it still has good signal and also a power plug-in nearby.
If speed is very important, Google, Linksys, and D-Link made mesh wireless systems. These all work together to find channels to talk to each other at the same time as providing highest speeds to the laptops, tablets, & smart devices. A friend uses the Google one and liked the speeds but they were pretty expensive.
Oh, they’re calling it Nest wifi now:
Linksys is called Velop:
Dlink calls their’s COVR, which I bet they hadn’t:
https://us.dlink.com/en/consumer/whole-home-wifi-systems
If you can run cable at all in your situation putting an Ethernet powered access point at the end of a run of relatively thin Cat5/6 wire will also provide maximum possible speeds. And there’s no need to have an electrical outlet at the far end.
I saw somewhere today that Eero’s mesh system is a Consumer Reports Best Buy.
It’s not the cheapest option, but it is very good. If you can wait a bit, hold out for Amazon Days or Black Friday. I got my Eero last year and it really has turned WiFi into something that doesn’t need to be thought about. I’ve had range boosters and repeaters before that only worked well if you stayed near whichever node and didn’t roam around - they had no automatic handoff. Eero just works end to end and even outside, if you want.
I just would like to mention that thick concrete walls block wifi signals a lot (at least in my parents’ apartment).
This is right. An extender cuts your bandwidth in half. That said, usually it is not a problem. Most people have 150 Mbps going out to their ISP and their router (if a modern one) is probably 500 or 1000 Mbps. So, even cut in half, their speed to the internet is unchanged. It only really matters if you have some crazy data transfer happening within your home…if you are unsure then you don’t…you’d know if you were one of those people.
Also, you can experiment using your cell phone. You can download WiFi signal analyzers for free on your phone. Run them and you can walk around and see the signal strength in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz (note there are different channels they can run on so you can even tweak your router to work in the gaps if you live in a “noisy” area for WiFi).
Lots of fiddling you can do.
As others already mentioned, if you want to skip all the fuss and get a great WiFi, go with a mesh router like Eero or Google or a few others. Super simple to set up and will fill all the gaps in coverage in your home with ease. Downside is they are not cheap.
You get what you pay for.
@Whack
Seconded. I did exactly that. Just search for “wifi speediest” in the app store. Check the signal right next to your wifi router and then walk around the house checking repeatedly to find the weal or dead zones. That will help you place the booster.
I found that even within rooms the signal can vary dramatically. For example, the spot where I stood in my home office by the desk was at an oblique angle to where the router was located. The router signal effectively passed through more wall and dropped to zero. A booster in that room along that wall would be useless since it got no signal to boost. I put the booster along the opposite wall.
Also, I have a related question:
My router is a Linksys that has 3 moveable antennas on it. When my ISP installed it, as far as I could tell, the guy just pulled it out of the box and hooked it up. No adjustments to them. He took the box and instructions with him. I’ve played around with them a bit, and didn’t really notice any changes.
So… does their positioning make a difference to the speed or signal? If so, how do I adjust them?
Hoo boy, I’m glad I asked. I had no idea that this was the case. My issue is actually speed rather than range.
My router is in the basement, laptop on the main floor. When I bring the laptop physically near the router, speed increases dramatically.
I will be moving the router to the main floor soon.
Thanks,
mmm
Warning - Anecdotal plug: After fighting WiFi quality in my home for several years, I tried bridges using old routers and DD-WRT, I tired several “Powerline” extenders from Netgear and TP-Link, none were consistently good and - as others have said, cut the speed in half.
I ended up with a Netgear Orbi system. It comprises a main router and two satellites. I think I paid about $250US for it. It’s a triband system so it uses a dedicated third 5GHz channel for backhaul.
My daughter’s bedroom is as far as it can be from my router. I pay for 600Mbps and sitting right by the router I get close to that. My daughter was getting 1 or maybe 2 bars and 10-20Mbps in her room. Horrible quality, dropped connections etc. At the time she was in her final year of her undergrad studies so it was a problem.
I positioned one satellite upstairs and one in the basement, both on her end of the house. The router is on the ground floor at the other end. Set up took about 30 minutes. I killed the WiFi and all routing from the XFinity modem/router and let the Orbi do everything.
She now gets three bars and 250-300Mbps. I also have 10 Sonos devices which were dropping out randomly, that all works flawlessly now.
YMMV. Good luck.
The basement is pretty much the worst place you could put your WiFi router.
WiFi signal spread out horizontally and down.
As for cutting the speed in half…see Post #7.
Point one antenna vertically, one horizontally and one at a 45 degree angle.
You can play with it too using a signal analyzer on your phone (as mentioned above…free app) but that is more work. Doing the above is an easy catch-all.
NOTE: More antennas just mean more devices can connect without sharing. A single antenna handles all connections which means 10 devices connected share that one antenna and thus have to trade-off talking to it which, basically, slows everything down.
More antennas means more devices can share the router simultaneously. And/or, with different antenna placement, you get more options for a better signal which means better speeds.
I bought this same unit about 2 months ago. It seemed to work fine until I found that my two WiFi connected printers quit working.
I’ve not been able to solve that issue yet so have disconnected the system.
A future project, perhaps with professional help.
Can you give a suggestion for this capability for my iPhone? I did a search at the App Store, and downloaded one of the top ones, but it only tells me what devices are connected to the one Wifi that my phone is connected to.
I also searched for “wifi speediest” like GMANCANADA suggested, but couldn’t find anything useful with that.
I have a new house and I’d like to optimize coverage for it, without having to buy extenders, but I think a mesh system may be in my near future.
I have an Android phone so I cannot say what is on iPhone but, usually, app developers put their programs on both.
I use WiFi Analyzer (NOTE: the capitalization matters…I saw one called “wifi analyzer” that had super bad reviews).
Hopefully it is on the iPhone store. If not I am sure there are others like it. Just search for wifi analyzer and pick with with lots of good reviews.
@Curt C
I have two apps but no preference, both work well on my iPhone. One is Speedtest (by Ookla) and the other is SpeedSmart (by VeeApps). As soon as I launch the app, there is just a big button that says “do speed test” and you tap it.
However, you can do the same test without downloading anything if you have a laptop. Just google* “internet speed test”* and go to a site. There’s lots. Walking around with a laptop is a bit more of a pain in the ass, that’s all.
The internet site won’t work on my phone. It can tell you’re accessing via a mobile device and they tell you you need to download the app for mobile use.
@ Whack
Thanks for the antenna tip.
The search should have been wifi Speed Test. It auto-corrected to “speediest”
My apologies, I didn’t catch the error.
That’s the system I use.
My Eero system just works, everywhere in my house and in my yard, and I never need to fuss around with it. The ones I use have wired connections between them, though they do work just fine without wires.
The user interface and functionality are excellent. I pay for their “Eero Plus” service because it comes with router-side ad blocking and malware blocking (like a “Pi hole”) as well as family licenses for 1Password, MalwareBytes, and Encrypt.me (a VPN).
I have that, but what Whack-a-Mole described was walking around and seeing signal strength in both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands.
What I did was get a wifi analyzer app on my phone and then wandered the house seeing where in each room the main router signals were strongest and weakest.
Then I got a Netgear N300 range extender, got it working on our network and then tried it in various plugs around the house until I got the best signals for my needs (Roku in living room and our bedroom).
You can set your devices up such that they’ll automatically switch to the best signal as well, so it’ll swap from the extender to the main or vice-versa, depending on where you are.