Which WIFI Extender to buy?

[pege63]

Friend of my asked me which WIFI Extender he should buy, do they all support Range extender mode, Access point mode, Media bridge mode, he want to runt it in AP mode?

 

[pete y testing]

Friend of my asked me witch WIFI Extender he should buy

you first answer should have been none , as extenders and repeaters are the very last thing to use in a home environment

suggest you recommend he look at ether having ethernet installed and running a second wireless access point

or

looki at using EOP / power line adapters with wifi at the second end

if and only if none of the above are feasible then look at repeaters and extenders as the last desperate step to get wifi to where it is needed

and if you must use one of the above

look at the asus rp-ac68u as at least it deals with some of the issues surrounding how repeaters and extenders work

 

[thiggins]

Today's wireless extenders are much better. But to get decent bandwidth you need a AC router and AC extender. AC1200 class will be fine.

Most all extenders have an Ethernet port that will let it act as a Wireless to Ethernet bridge. Not all support access point mode.

Check the Wireless Extender ranker for product performance ranking.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/rankers/wireless-extender/view

 

[somms]

You don't necessarily need to buy specifically an extender with the proper firmware flashed onto your router.

In my case, I use a pair of R7000 one flashed with Shibby's tomato firmware the other with DD-WRT functioning as the range extender. This DD-WRT-flashed R7000 is set to client wireless mode back to my R7000 gateway over 5GHz N-only radio.

Normal non-extended bandwidth...

Since neither wireless router are AC-compatible the drawback as Tim mentioned shown above is the 2nd client R7000 takes a hit and the avail wireless bandwidth drops to half!

 

[pete y testing]

Today's wireless extenders are much better.

thats why i suggested the rp-ac68u , but it still cant get past the fact all clients connected behind the repeater are stripped with the same mac address which is that of the repeater and thus removes the ability to control these individual clients behind the repeater

along with the fact all repeaters seem to have issue if the main wifi is dropped for any reason the repeaters struggle to re associate with the main routers wifi

so although yes these new repeaters have better speed and throughput they still do have other issue that frustrate many users and as i have said and i believe you have also , ethernet and AP first followed by powerline and then if no other choice repeaters and extenders

pete

 

[sfx2000]

Today's wireless extenders are much better. But to get decent bandwidth you need a AC router and AC extender. AC1200 class will be fine.

Most all extenders have an Ethernet port that will let it act as a Wireless to Ethernet bridge. Not all support access point mode.

There's a bit of a quirk with Extender/Repeaters - traffic on the other side of the extender (the "extended clients") may show as coming from the Extender's MAC address, and some consumer grade Router/AP's might get a bit confused when applying certain policies - like Parental Controls...

Depends on the vendor for both the AP and Extender, but generally, one wants to stay with the same vendor as to not get caught by this little standards quirk...