Everything You Need To Know About Wireless Bridging and Repeating

[corgi1]

I have ordered some new Encore ENHWI-2AN34D N routers and expect them to arrive on Monday. Am planning my setup for replacing my old G network. Will have one as the main DHCP router and 5 other routers connecting to it. According to the user manual they support both non-WDS repeating and WDS connections (up to a max of 4). I am wondering would you recommend I connect all of them as repeaters using non-WDS and WPA security? Or should I use WDS bridging for 4 of them and just one as a non-WDS repeater? If I do the latter option, I believe my security will be limited to WEP.

 

[Unregistered]

Bandwidth drop

I am not new to wireless networks by any stretch of the imagination. I'm also not new to WDS, having run a dual dd-wrt network with a primary router and a secondary router as a repeater bridge with a 64-bit hex WPA2 key. I recently discovered that the repeater bridge mode in dd-wrt actually used WDS, which I was disappointed with. I know that with two WDS devices half of your wifi signal is used for the repeating while the over half is used for data. I'm also under the impression that for every WDS device beyond the first two, you loose another half of your available data bandwidth. What I have not had a Vance to confirm or deny, is wiener or not there is a repeater option out there that does not have the bandwidth decrease? Is this just a natural flaw with the wireless signal or is there a way to do a true wireless repeater wig no bandwidth drop, perhaps with a device with multiple radios?

There is something else I was wondering in regard to a wireless AP, which I have not truly used. If I set up an AP on floor 2 of a two story house, with a wireless router on floor one, do they have to be set up with separate SSIDs? Or is there a way to have them use the same SSID? The goal would be to let someone go between floors, using each floor's respective SSID, but not have to change networks. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks.

 

[thiggins]

The reason for WDS bandwidth drop is explained on the first page of Everything You Need To Know About Wireless Bridging and Repeating - Part 1: WDS.

Your SSID question is answered here How To Add an Access Point to a Wireless Router - Steps 3-6

 

[D34thbr1ng3r]

Can I use a Engenius esr7750 to repeat my 5ghz signal from my Linksys E4200? I guess the e4200 is non-WDS but since the engenius work with WDS and Non-WDS it shouldn't be a problem right?

 

[D34thbr1ng3r]

Any help please...

 

[thiggins]

but since the engenius work with WDS and Non-WDS

Where did you get that information? The 7750 supports WDS. See the manual.

 

[Apgad]

Has anyone seen or used something like this: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Wireless...93041967?pt=AU_Networking&hash=item27be191f2f ?

I like the idea of simply having it plugged into the wall, and not taking up any extra space. All I want to do is to boost my current 2.4GHz N signal, which this seems to do. It looks a lot cheaper than a lot of the APs described in these article, but is that just because you're not paying for the other features (which I don't need)?

I'm a little wary, as I can't find much information about this anywhere else...

Thanks for any input.