Would a wireless repeater help me?

[Oly J]

Hi all, I'm currently dealing with the frustrations of wi-fi, as I'm sure many of you will be intimately familiar with, see, after uni I've (hopefully temporarily) moved back in with my parents, (hoping to continue studies at Master's level) but see, one thing I had got used to, was a decent internet connection, which I simply don't always have here.

My family uses a wi-fi router, and my room is further removed from said router than any other, my point being, my signal ain't always great, well it's never great, at best it's mostly usable unfortunately ethernet's out, as there is no port near enough to me for it to be possible (the parents insist it wouldn't work anyway, but I'm not sure about that)

so I've been thinking about buying a repeater to extend the range of the router, thing is I don't know the first thing about how they work, how to set one up or how good they are. So I'm hoping someone can help me out here? as the only one of my parents in the house with even a rudimentary understanding of computers seems to think signal strength is a myth, (his actual words) not understanding that it is a signal, and not magic, so I'm clearly getting no help here.

Basically has anyone had good or bad experiences with repeaters? is there a trick to using them? would that even help me here? any advice you could give would be much appreciated.

 

[SnowyGamester]

Repeaters work but they're really a last option if nothing else is available. They're fairly simple to set up - just plug into power, connect to the access point the repeater creates, open a browser and go through the setup wizard to connect it to your existing network. You want to place it somewhere where it gets adequate signal from both the router it's repeating and the device it's repeating to, so somewhere around the halfway point between your computer and the existing WiFi network. Since it's going through two WiFi networks effectively your bandwidth with be half and latency will be double as compared to connecting to the network directly over WiFi (from the halfway point - obviously it will be better than a direct connection from where you currently are). Obviously you want a repeater with the same capabilities as your existing access point (i.e. if you're using wireless n you want a repeater that can do at least wireless n) and usually the bigger and more antennas the better.

Not sure how it works with modem/router leasing from your service provider in the UK but it may be a better option to replace yours entirely with something more capable if possible or connect a second better access point to your existing network via Ethernet rather than going for the repeater option. The ones your service provider give you are usually garbage toilets.

 

[mad825]

I assume you're using a laptop? I would suggest getting a USB Wifi dongle(something with a antenna). If your house is big (which I doubt cuz its the UK) then I would suggest a repeater. I would also go through the router settings to see if anything can be done there as well.

You may end-up sacrificing speed for stability but make sure you get one that's compatible at 5GHz

 

[Wholesale Karma]

I'm assuming you can't move the original router? Since you admit that you don't know much about the topic but you're thinking of buying a repeater, I would look into just buying a nicer router. Try one that says it uses 802.11n and/or 802.11ac. Not sure which is best.

I set a repeater up once and ran into various problems. The whole experience wasn't awful, but I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly at first and I think I ran into the dreaded double NAT issue at some point. If you have neighbors running routers, you could be getting some interference since most run at 2.4 Ghz. I've got one that can broadcast at both 2.4 and 5 Ghz at the same time, but the latter has poorer range even though you get less interference.

There are other options like trying opensource firmware called DD-WRT, but if you're just doing this to connect one thing, just go with my original advice. I can potentially have 8 devices connected all at once and I've got to assign static IPs to devices and look up their MAC addresses to keep them straight, but if you want a great learning experience, by all means...