Wireless network setup for 4 story townhouse

Question

I currently have a Wireless N router + DOCSIS 3.0 modem on the 3rd floor of my home, and would like to have wifi access on every floor.

I have very little background in networking, and was wondering what the best way would be to do this at minimal cost.

We've considered getting a repeater, but have also read that they cut bandwidth in half (we'd like to avoid this). We've also read that we can flash DD-WRT onto our $20 router and configure it as a repeater, which makes me question why people would buy $20 repeaters in the first place.

We don't necessarily need to have a single network throughout the house, if it helps (we could configure multiple APs). We just want every floor to have internet access.

Answer 1

If you own the house, it might be worth looking into getting Cat5/Cat6 cables installed to each floor or even each room.

In the long run, it will be well worth the investment. Once you have the Ethernet cables in place, you can put an AP on each floor.

The Unifi range (and many others), have zero hand-off, allowing your devices to roam between each floor.

Alternatively, I'd recommend looking at Ethernet over Power - EoP. A much cheaper solution but similar to the above Ethernet option, you can put an AP on each floor, connected to your main router via EoP.

I used a set of 4 Netgear EoP units for my townhouse, before I invested in Ethernet cabling last year. While YMMV, depending on the electrical cabling in your house, EoP did work quite well for my general usage, including streaming HD movies from my NAS. I only invested in the cables because we renovated our house.

Answer 2

A faster alternative to EoP ("Powerline," or "Homeplug") is MoCA (Multimedia over Coax, also called "ethernet over coax"). If you've got the house wired for cable on all floors, you can set up a separate wireless access point on each floor, which should give you great wifi coverage. I live in a 4-storey townhouse, under my landlord, and he provides Wifi. It's not good, and given the number of users and wifi clients (machines connected to the network), speeds are slow. Repeaters probably won't help nearly as much as either the EoP or MoCA options.

MoCA will deliver you up to 100 MBps speeds via ethernet wherever you set up an adapter.

The drawback to MoCA is very few people know much about it, and it takes a while to understand. It works great, however, as long as you have good coax/cable wiring in your home. Good luck.