We've all seen it, "Use a wired AP. When you use a range extender your times will be halved."
Just wanted to take a few minutes and thank everyone for their input. I learned a lot and I thank you all for that!
The original question was,
Boo, range extenders, evil. They'll double your times, half your throughput. Is conventional wisdom correct?
And the answer is yes, but ...
At my son's large (by my standards) family home Wi-Fi runs amazingly well. A house full of kids and everyone is happy. Except for the master bedroom. It could not be further from the router if you had designed it that way. We could have run cable, well not us, we would have had to hire a professional, a few hundred dollars, but it could have been done.
But for fifty bucks we picked up a cheap range extender, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, plugged it into a wall outlet and five minutes later his wife was streaming movies and catching up on Facebook from the comfort of her bed.
Or, back at the car lot, I simply couldn't. I'm 70 years old. I wasn't about to grab a pick ax and shovel and break through a hundred feet of black topped parking lot to lay a cable. All said and done it would have been about five grand to an outside contracter.
I had a contractor come in who proposed an Ethernet radio bridge but the owner turned that down too. I work for a used car dealer. It just ... wasn't ... going ... to happen. So I did what I did, I used a range extender.
In any case let's talk about the data. In bldg. 2 a couple users could connect wireless to the main bldg. Kinda. Slow, intermittent, lots of disconnects. The rest couldn't.
We picked out the best place to connect and set a wireless laptop there. We then fine tuned the placement of the range extender by mounting it on a shelf about three feet above the desk and another two feet over. Here's the data:
- 56 Mbps - Laptop wireless to main bldg.
- 93 Mbps - Laptop wireless to range extender (wireless to main bldg.)
- 215 Mbps - Laptop hardwired to range extender (wireless to main bldg.)
So yes, 93 compared to 215, throughput was definitely halved.
But 93 compared to my best case user with 56 ... definite improvement (which is what
misled me to my original question). As I walk through bldg. 2 everything, every room, works, no drops. The guys who split time between the two buildings can't tell the difference. (Of course we've only got a 15 x 1.5 Mbps Internet service so we do keep expectations on the low side : -)
Now we've the original leg (leg A) from bldg. 2 to the main bldg. and the new leg (leg B) which is bldg. 2 users to the range extender. 2X. Or, maybe, a little less ...
- Leg B (range extender) should be a little faster than original leg A, that's why we put in the range extender to start with.
- Leg A should be faster than the original leg A
- We dropped the deadwood.
- We optimized positioning.
- We have no bldg. 2 clients on the back haul radio
- If we had a tri-band router we would have no clients on the back haul radio
Case in point,
93 Mbps compared to my best case user with 56. Intriguing,
compared with my old reality I'm 65% better but ... compared to my
new reality my speeds are indeed
halved!
I do concur (my original premise was wrong) with the consensus (use wired APs) but;
- They're not evil, range extenders can (and do) work (for some applications)
- You can hard wire clients to the range extender (turning it into a kind of inside out AP ; -)
- Some range extenders can be converted to a wired AP later
I think I finally (almost) understand. Thanks again!