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Redoing my Home Network - Advice needed (wired and wireless)

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Greg Wilder

New Around Here
I have a pretty old wired Netgear router and an Airport extreme. I am wanting to upgrade. Below is my scenario.

Background
==============
Large home, 5000 sq feet. Basement , 3 floors total. Outdoor patio and screened porch.
My office is in the basement. This is where my cable modem is, and most of my wired equipment.
I do have one wired cable connection on the main/middle floor of the house.
I have about 8 wired devices (iMac, NAS, Apple TV, Time capsule, Roku, etc)
And I have 10-12 wireless devices. Mostly laptops, iphones and tablets. But also 2 iMacs which do some video streaming. The family does a lot of video streaming on their iphones and tablets.
I have never been able to do powerline networking very well. My electric box is "split" someway, and does not transmit to all outlets in the home.

Here is what I want to do.
=======================
Basement
Use existing cable modem (this is the only place in the house I can connect my cable modem)
Need a new Wifi router , with at least 4 wired Gigabit ports (for my NAS, time capsule, etc). I need both high speed wired in the basement. And also good coverage wifi for the patio and screened in porch.

Main Middle floor - Again, I have one wired ethernet connection here, with a 4 port switch. The switch is where I connect my Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon fire.
I'd like to add another wifi device to this 4 port switch. I want to extend wifi coverage to the main floor, and to the upstairs bedrooms. And outside into the garage in the front of the home.

I was looking to get something like an AC3200 type router for the basement. To handle the wired devices, and the wifi in the basement, outside areas.
What kind of wifi device or setup do I need on the main floor? I have read here, to use repeater mode as a last resort. Can I setup another AC3200 type router as an access point? And not cut my speeds in half?

Thanks in advance.
Greg
 
When are you planning to do this upgrade? If you can wait a couple of months, it looks like the RT-AC88U is the one to buy and keep for the next few years.

Maybe other routers even more suitable will be introduced by then too, but if you need to do something today, the RT-AC68U or the RT-AC3200 routers with RMerlin firmware (or the john9527 and the hggomes forks) are the only two to consider now.

Forget repeater mode, connect via Ethernet cable an additional AP located as centrally as possible (in 3D space) of the areas to be covered instead.
 
Dont use wireless bridges because to do it right is complicated and requires multiple APs, more than you would think.

If you dont need the performance than wire your house and you can use wifi routers as both switches and APs and than just wire everything to a central switch/router depending on how many cables. You dont need to drill holes for ethernet rather you can get flat ones and hide them on ceiling corners, walls, above/under doors and if you do it well it will last and not trip people.

There are lots of good ways to distribute a network around a big house but if you're going to have a big house dont go skimping on costs for your network as it will bite you back when you really need it. Go for Cat5e ethernet at least. Wifi bridging is only a last resort and proper wifi bridging is done with the right hardware and not a bunch of consumer routers bridging and distributing wifi at the same time.
 

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