WIFI Extenders

Jelster

Jelster

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I'm not a complete novice when it comes to WiFi, I used to sell commercial solutions a number of years ago. However, we're looking at changing our BB supplier, I'm currently with BT and have one of their "Disc's" to extend the range to the back of the bungalow. I don't like the fact that the BB companies want. to charge me £5-7/month (over 24 months) for something I can buy for £35-55.

This one LINK looks good and it was top of a "best buy" survey.

What I'me not sure of is does the extender set up a completely new WiFi zone, with different SSID & password, or does it just extend the range of the router?

An ideas??
 
Jelster said:
I'm not a complete novice when it comes to WiFi, I used to sell commercial solutions a number of years ago. However, we're looking at changing our BB supplier, I'm currently with BT and have one of their "Disc's" to extend the range to the back of the bungalow. I don't like the fact that the BB companies want. to charge me £5-7/month (over 24 months) for something I can buy for £35-55.

This one LINK looks good and it was top of a "best buy" survey.

What I'me not sure of is does the extender set up a completely new WiFi zone, with different SSID & password, or does it just extend the range of the router?

An ideas??
Click to expand...
I don't know that particular model but you can usually either make it clone the original, or set up a new network.
In my experience it depends on your connecting devices which one is best. Some handle the switch to a different source better than others. You may also have to play with which transmitter handles DHCP for the internal ip addressing.
 
I put 3 BT disks in our house after numerous complaints from my family about the WiFi from our Virgin Hub 3.0 dropping out in our brick built 3 bed semi!!

Had to put the modem into router mode and it took a little while for all the discs to start talking to each other, and had to move a couple to get a good signal, but we've had them a few years now and the Wi Fi mesh has been rock solid. No more complaints, our two teenage sons were even gaming over the WiFi with no complaints.

HTH

David
 
Some of the repeaters make things worse. 2.4 ghz is just slow as I think it tops out at 100mb best case anyway. It also suffers a lot from interference as most people mostly use that and it reaches quite far.

I have some TP Link ones and they have a few different set up options. I did have some Asus ones that supposedly made a mesh and they were awful. They'd just disappear randomly.

The TP Link ones are pretty good. I have it set to join the 5ghz network and repeat it and the 2.4. . The 5ghz is over a gigabit so you want as much of the high bandwidth using devices on that as possible.


I have tried a lot of them over the years and these are the best so far. I have had a lot that would just reset themselves randomly and lose their settings. Others that had to be turned off and on again every so often. These generally just sit and get on with it. The tether app you set them up with is pretty decent and you can keep an eye on them via it to see who connects to which one and who is connected to the router.
 
I tried a wifi extender that looked approximately like the one in your link, though not the same. It was woeful. Following advice from my son, I bought a couple of Deco M5 mesh devices and they have been very good. Three would probably be better but 2 work fairly well. One is connected to the router near the back of the house, via ethernet cable; the second is in the garage near the front of the house. I'd put a third in an upstairs room roughly between the two but nearer the side.

It has some nice features, tells me when people join the wifi etc. I've disabled one feature, which silently (?) blocked some websites it deemed suspicious. I couldn't work out why I couldn't get through to TP!!
 
I have had much success with extenders. I bought a BT mesh system and they were fine. VM upgraded our BB last year and the engineer said that the existing mesh should not be necessary given the speed increase. However their monitoring system did notice the signal was weak in part of the house and sent us a VM WiFi Pod, which is also fine.
 
I would go with a mesh rather than an extender.
TP Link are okay. Orbi's are okay too. Ubiquiti Unifi are top of the range (but expensive).

Willid1 said:
I put 3 BT disks in our house after numerous complaints from my family about the WiFi from our Virgin Hub 3.0 dropping out in our brick built 3 bed semi!!

Had to put the modem into router mode and it took a little while for all the discs to start talking to each other, and had to move a couple to get a good signal, but we've had them a few years now and the Wi Fi mesh has been rock solid. No more complaints, our two teenage sons were even gaming over the WiFi with no complaints.

HTH

David
Click to expand...
Whilst they recommend using modem mode, it's not actually necessary.
If you don;t, you do add an extra hop and tiny bit of processing, but in the world it has no discernable impact (I guess if you were port forwarding to host applications it might).
I run two different meshes behind my virgin router, without changing to modem mode, and it means that I have 3 separate wifis.
(The why is because I want all the IoT devices on a completely separate network).
 
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