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Need help in selecting powerful household wireless router

post #1 of 4
2/12/13 at 12:33am
Thread Starter 
Not sure if this is the right area to post this, but it seems to be the closest on topic.

We have a long house floor plan. The most distant bedroom is about 90 feet from the location of our cable modem and our wifi router. We also usually have 3-4 different wifi users trying to log on at the same time in the bedrooms. The result is difficulty logging on and what seems to be some sort of bandwidth issue since my son, whose room is closest to the router,
Is always gaming via wifi which seems to starve the other users that are downstream from his room.

My iPad in particular seems to have problems picking up and maintaining the wifi connection

My question is what is the best way to improve the signal over this distance so the bedroom occupants can access the wifi with multiple other users and not have the signal repeatedly dropping off.

Should we get a more powerful router or set up some sort of relay/repeater that will boost the signal at near full strength to the end of the house.

Any input would be most welcome as this is getting so frustrating i've almost chucked my iPad in moments of distress after signal loss

Thanks for any suggestions
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post #2 of 4
2/12/13 at 5:49am
Either move the router to a more central location or install a second one closer to the other end of the house. If you move it, you would want to run 2 cables to the new location -- 1 to to go from the cable modem to the router, and a second one to go from the router back to a switch where all of your network connections are currently run. If you add a second router, you will need to configure the new router to have a different DHCP range that the existing router.
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post #3 of 4
2/12/13 at 7:01am
Quote:
The result is difficulty logging on and what seems to be some sort of bandwidth issue since my son, whose room is closest to the router,
Is always gaming via wifi which seems to starve the other users that are downstream from his room.

It sounds like this is a bandwith issue instead of a signal strength issue. If that's the case, installing another router isn't going to do much. You might want to increase your internet speeds (via your ISP). Alternatively, you should be able to limit your son's bandwith allocation via the router.
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post #4 of 4
2/12/13 at 9:43am
I have spent a few years messing around with this problem, and here are a few things to try (some have been mentioned above):

1. The ASUS RT-N66U wireless router. This thing is unbelievable. Very fast router with very high-speed wireless. It may solve part of your problem http://matt.bo.lt/asus_rt_n66uhttp://matt.bo.lt/asus_wireless
2. Go to an "access point" model with multiple wireless "access points" along the axis of your house. I recommend direct wire to each access point. Remember that most wireless routers become access points when you shut off management of IP addresses (DHCP)
3. Set up QoS on your router so that the gaming port gets some, but not all of the bandwidth

I would recommend the http://matt.bo.lt/d_link_wifi_router_disguised_as_smoke_detector model to keep it inconspicuous. You can even configure the LED not to be on so it really is unnoticeable.

BTW, don't get spooked by the URLs. I am using Bo.lt to shorten links. It keeps a copy of the page so that the link doesn't die.
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