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I've got poor signal strength and quality in one of the rooms in my house. This room has a single ethernet cable. I would like to extend my network so that said room upstairs has a better signal. I have a 100Mbps connection, but this "bad room" only gets about 50Mbps over WIFI. I have an arris dg1670 modem / dual band wifi router. I want to extend my signal in the best way possible with minimal signal loss and maximum speed. My network supports Windows 8 and Mac OS's.

I am considering a wifi range extender. Will any range extender do or do I need to find something that supports dual band 5GHz? Do I have any other options (access point) and why would I consider them over a range extender?

Note most of my equipment is WiFi only.

4 Answers 4

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Your question is a little unclear, but I will try to suggest:

If the room has a single ethernet cable, then consider adding another wifi router. Give it the same SSID and I believe your devices may automatically select the router they can find, though it may not be the best signal. That depends on the device.

I have a 100Mbps connection, but this "bad room" only gets about 50Mbps are we talking about the wired or the wireless connection here? Sorry, you did say you had a single cable to this room.

My take on a repeater is that the reason why there is a pile of them at Fry's with return stickers is that repeaters are restricted to either broadcast OR receive and cannot do both at the same time. This effectively cuts your bandwidth in half. If you need a repeater, then you really need to cross a very wide river with an island in the middle, for the repeater, because this is the only situation I would choose a repeater for.

If you are getting 50 Mbps per second wifi in the bad room, I would expect the repeater to give you no better.

I am not sure what the ethernet over power solution will do for you, if you have a cable there, as you say.

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  • +1 Because the information on repeaters is new and useful. My concern and limitations are limited to WIFI only. I only mentioned the hard line because it might increase my options for extending WIFI by adding a router/repeater to the hard line as you mentioned. In my experience, two routers on one network creates a lot of problems. I think an access point makes more sense no? Nov 19, 2014 at 23:42
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Do not use a repeater! If you put the repeater half way, it will only have a signal of 50% to start with. It will present you the 50% signal as a 100% signal, but you are actually using 50% of the bandwidth possible.

As mentioned above, put a cable to the spot where you want good coverage and put an access point or router there.

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A complete different alternative is Ethernet over Power. Essentially it turns your electrical lines into an ethernet cable more or less. You hook one end up to the modem/router and the other end to your computer.

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  • Updated question to point out that most of my equipment is wifi only. Nov 19, 2014 at 21:46
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I chose a 3 in 1 solution: ASUS EA-N66. The device is dual band with Ethernet Adapter mode, Access Point mode and repeater mode options. I can configure the device to see if Access point or repeater mode gives all my wifi devices 100Mbps speed.

I will post results after it arrives in December.

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