Improving wifi in house

Happy_Harry

I have a detached dormer bungalow, footprint downstairs roughly 22 m by 10 m, internal walls all concrete block. Upstairs roughly 18 by 6 m. Stud walls.

Right now I have my router (TP Link N600) more or less in the middle of the house. I have wifi coverage everywhere however speeds are a lot worse at the outer ends of the house (living room on one side, bedroom on other). Typically signal strength of -70/75 dbm compard to 55 ish at the centre of the house.
I also notice that Plex struggles sometimes to stream 1080p movies and have to lower to 720.

Time to take some action.. But I am not sure what, so would like some advice.

Options I can see
1. Hardwire and have some APs at the outer ends of the house. This will involve a lot of work, and not sure whether I will succeed.. I have some ducts used for a phone line and for coax , that I hopefully can use, but not sure and even then it will be a right pain as I will have to work in the eves, with not a lot of space to manoever

2. Simply get a state of the art wifi router and hope for the best

3. Use a mesh system, like BT whole home wifi/ Netgear Orbi etc.. The issue I think is that the internet is coming into the middle of the house and the best placement for a satellite on one side of the house will likely be in the narrow hall where I only have one electricity socket, and I think it is too close to where I would have the main router.

Powerline adapters don't seem to work. I tried this a few years back and lost more than half of the (internet) speed and red lights blinking indicating issues (probably due to the sockets being on different circuits or other wiring issues) . The only question I would have - I tried this in the past with 200Mbps adapters, would it make any difference if I would use the latest models with like 1000Mbps ?

I would like to strike a balance between performance, elbow grease/time/effort and budget. In that order of importance.

Any suggestions ?

Nonoperational

I have the orbi RB50 system. 1600 sq foot house and have 3 access points. It is fantastic.

jem

I have a well spread 1800 bungaloe solid block walls . The current modem is in the sitting room.
Wifi on other side of the house is very poor.
would this be the best thing to buy to extend the wifi to other rooms at teh other side of the house.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01L9O08PW/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza

Happy_Harry

This is what I have tried.. I bought a Ubiquiti Long range AP and a 25 m ethernet cable to test out.

Wherever I put the AP, there was very little , if any, improvement of wifi. I do understand they should be ceiling mounted, but based on the fact that there was hardly any improvement, I decided to close down this route and returned it to amazon next day. Not sure if it was a faulty one, but later I read reviews from many people in my situation that didn't see any improvements either.

I did have an (almost ancient) Wifi extender (BT 600 - the black version) lying around. I set it up with same SSID and pw as main Imagine router/modem and plugged it in in various places. I have it now in the far bedroom on one side of the house (my main router is literally in the middle of the house).

I am well aware what typically the view is of these extenders , in that they cut your speed in half, but I can assure it doesn't.
I now have more or less the same speed in that bedroom as I would have elsewhere in the house. It communicates with the router on 2.4 GHZ and as AP on 5 GHZ. It also covers the bedroom on first floor right above. And there is no (noticeable) hand off, roaming through the house.


I then needed the same solution for the other side of the house and bought a newer version of that extender, a white one. That one however does seem to mess up when roaming , and (in layman's terms) seems to not want to let go of devices connected to it, so when you leave that room and get back in the area of where the main router has the stronger signal, stays connected. Somehow it doesn't make sense as it should be the device that holds on to a signal, but the same device has no issues with handing off from the older extender.

So, now I got another one of the older model extenders on ebay and once I have it in the house, hopefully it will sort out the other side of the house and I will be done.

I have a max 100-150 Mb internet speed so it works for me.. I guess if you have 300 or higher , it will cut your speed.

So I hope to have fixed my problem for less 20 euro..(at least for now)

Oh.. Th house is roughly 2900 Sq ft.

Happy_Harry

jem wrote: »

I have a well spread 1800 bungaloe solid block walls . The current modem is in the sitting room.
Wifi on other side of the house is very poor.
would this be the best thing to buy to extend the wifi to other rooms at teh other side of the house.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01L9O08PW/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza

So based on my experience, you may just try a much cheaper solution first.

This is the one that sorted my problem https://www.ebay.ie/itm/BT-Dual-Band-Wi-Fi-Extender-600/283644273462?hash=item420a842336:g:hpIAAOSwtKldpfpI

NSAman

I am also a fan of Orbi.

The office is ancient and tall 6 floors and running wires was not an option (historical) we installed the Orbi and it does the job perfectly 18,000s ft with concrete floors on multiple levels all mesh perfectly.

The house is 3 storey, 5,000sqft and always had issues on the ground floor, Orbi solves this issue and runs perfectly also.