What is the best wireless access point to use when you need 2 access points?

D

Dale_tem

Messages
2,839
Name
Dale
Edit My Images
Yes
My parents house suffers from poor wireless signal in parts of the house. We are getting some runs of Cat 6 around the outside of the house to 2 points so we can run 2 wireless access points and have better access all over.

I have this at home, but have 2 wireless networks and the devices switch between, but sometimes I have to switch manually. I want it idiot proof and I want the 2 access points to act as 1 access point with just one SSID which the devices are happy to switch between.

So what technology is it I need (is it WDS?) and any recommendations?
 
I use Best Wifi for Android, there's probably something for ios too. It automatically joins the device to the strongest signal and switches if one signal becomes stronger.
 
Have the AC66U, top piece of kit, need it here as there are literally hundreds of wifi networks within line of sight...the Asus dumps all over the local ones efficiently enough to give a reliable signal, even on the street 17 floors down :)
 
Yup... AC66U is the alternative if you want AC rather than N....
 
Would it not be easier to use wireless homeplugs? I have a few dotted around the house sharing the same SSID. All my devices switch automatically and max out my internet connection.
 
Just looked at the Asus and it is a bit expensive, especially as I need 2.

Any other recommendations?
 
Dale... You asked for the best...:)
 
Used homeplugs a few times and I still don't trust them to be an install and forget solution. I have to unplug one of ours at home once a week to keep it working and just before we started the extension, one of them died.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Wireless homeplugs, so you don't even need to run cat5 around. Really.
Click to expand...
Would do if you want limited speeds, but I wouldn't like to access a disk over it for anything other than streaming movies. They don't give anything like the claimed rate unfortunately, so it's down to what you will be using it for.
 
I've been using TPLink plugs, plus a netgear homeplug router in a room with a PC and NAS for > a year now, without trouble - they've just been fit & forget.

The 200Mbs - bits per sec - delivers around 20Mbyte/sec to the NAS, so not too far off. Not ideal, but liveable.
 
Last edited:
ancient_mariner said:
I've been using TPLink plugs, plus a netgear homeplug router in a room with a PC and NAS for > a year now, without trouble - they've just been fit & forget.
Click to expand...
In which case you will be transferring at a snails pace compared to what you could do via cabled.... (I run homeplugs and wired networks between different rooms). Whether that is an issue is another matter, but I wouldn't like to do anything other than very light data traffic over home plugs. Put it this way, my broadband is faster than my homeplug connection (I have 2 x 500Mbit homeplugs and a 62Mbit broadband connection).....

As I said, depends what you want to do - I regularly copy 10G files around, I would not like to do that at 5Mbytes/sec (which is what my homeplugs give me) when wired does it at 100Mbytes/sec.
 
The important bit is this is not for my house, so I want ease of use.

As for my house, getting the upstairs redone so all rooms will be cabled!
 
Have a look at Cloudtrax/Open-mesh, it's an extremely cheap and reliable cloud-managed meshed wireless solution. Looks VERY good and the pricing is ridiculous, I know a couple of people with them and they have no issues whatsoever.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top