Router Suggestion for 3 Story Home

hockey9592 · Nov 1, 2013

I live in a 3 story house, roughly 3,000 square feet. My current router is a "D-Link DIR-628 RangeBooster N Dual Band Router" and is on the 3rd floor. The connection is fine in the room it is located but the signal is cut in half in other rooms on the 3rd floor, only gets 1-2 bars on the 2nd floor, and has no reception in the 1st floor basement. I also believe it is failing because it does cut off for about 10 minutes at a time roughly 3 times a week.

Do you recommend purchasing a new router? If so, what should I look for in terms of performance and more importantly signal strength that will work throughout the house? My ISP plan is 20 Mbps download speed. Does that have anything to do with the decision in which router to purchase? Also, there could be as many as 9 devices connected at once but usually there are 4 constant connections.

After looking online at Routers they vary in price and specifications. 300 Mbps, 900 Mbps, etc. Are these numbers really that important in relation to my current ISP performance or does that having nothing to do with it? And if those numbers are only important for devices communicating with each other on the same Router then I don't care about that as I rarely have my devices communicate with each other (ex: I rarely use my Smartphone to transfer files to my laptop via WiFi).

smorizio · Nov 1, 2013

most home routers and laptops are low power and you will get dead spots with one router and the wrong location. in the basement i would use one of those small smoke dector looking ap and have it link to the router on the first floor or hard wire it into a switch and have the switch on the first floor with the cable modem and the main router. then on the third floor i would use another ap or repeater. the only downsize is you may add a little more lag to the wifi network. i would also spend the extra and buy the 5g and 2.4 parts and slowly update your wifi dongles and or wifi cards. if your going to game or video stream the new high speed band is worth it.

Chainzsaw · Nov 1, 2013

You may want to look into getting an access point router - although this way may be a bit more complicated. Basically your wireless router would connect to the access point which would then also provide wireless access.

You would have to make sure they are compatible. You would also have to make sure they are on separate wireless channels for best performance.

hockey9592 · Nov 1, 2013

Would something like this work?

Edimax EW-7438RPn 300Mbps Wireless 802.11/b/g/n Universal Wi-Fi Range Extender

Here it is on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7438RPn-Wireless-Universal-Extender/dp/B00794RDVY/ref=cm_cd_ql_qh_dp_t

Thanks

Chainzsaw · Nov 1, 2013

It looks like it should work, however it may or may not give you the best results (according to some of the reviews).

Do you have a friend with a wireless router? Maybe you could borrow one for a day or so to test one out and see what you think. Most wireless routers have the ability to act as an access point.

Never heard of edimax so just be weary.

hockey9592 · Nov 1, 2013

Is there a brand of router or access point router you would recommend? I will see about borrowing one.

bill001g · Nov 2, 2013

Be very careful about "range extenders". This term is used way too loosely. There are 2 devices that can do this function. The first is a AP, this device take data via a ethernet cable and "extends" it to the remote location and then transmits wireless. A repeater takes the signal via wireless and then transmits a second wireless signal.

In either case you must get the signal to the device for it to transmit out the wireless signal. In the case of the AP you may not be able to get a ethernet cable run where you need it. In the second case the device must receive very strong wireless signal in the first place...if it does not have the data its not like it can magically send it to the end device.

I suspect if the signal levels in your house are as poor as you say you are going to have major problems if you cannot run ethernet cable. If you were to place a repeater on the second floor you are already getting not the best reception. This means you have data loss and retransmission. Then you finally repeat the signal to the lower floor (assuming it even works) and you get a equal bad singal level. So now you have 2 poor wireless connections in the path. Both will take data loss and slow you down. .....but it may still be better than nothing.

You other option is a variation of the first. You hook your router to a AP with a ethernet cable but you use something else to replace the ethernet cable. The first people use is called powerline networking. This runs data over the electrical power. Like wireless how well it works greatly varies from house to house...some it does not work at all. A second method to replace ethernet cable is to use something called MoCA. This assumes you have coax tv cables you can use. This is not real popular because it conflicts with technology used by DVR manufactures to provide multi room DVR devices. So if you have the coax and you do not use these type of DVR it might be a option.

sg4rb0 · Nov 2, 2013

If you want this setup properly you need some software like inSSIDer to check the signal strength in each location.

What's your budget? I would recommend getting 2 access points (AP's).

By using 2 AP's, this will help you get a high signal strength on each floor. It's not very complicated to setup, you basically just need to bridge each AP to the router.

I've set this up for many offices around the world. Just takes a bit of patience when positioning the AP's.

The only other way is to buy a directional antenna for those laptops and point them as best you can to the router. This really ain't the best way going forward though.

hockey9592 · Nov 2, 2013

I tried another router today, a Linksys E1200. The results were very similar so the connection problem still exists.

But budget is about $100, which I have been told is the cost for a new decent router. But I am more interested in 2 AP's, which I have never done.

I don't know much about WiFi but everyone here seems helpful. Thanks for the help

bill001g · Nov 2, 2013

Highly unlikely you will see much difference between router with similar feature sets. They pretty much all transmit at the maximum legal power and most use the same exact radio chipsets. Most the differences are in the software features not the radios wireless signals themselves.

Remember a AP needs a cable to connect from the main router to the AP. Anything that uses wireless to talk to the main router is a repeater not a AP. The vast majority of repeaters are cheap pieces of junk. They at the very minimum cut your speed in half because they transmit and receive with the same radios. Higher end repeaters use separate radios for the connection back to the router and to the end users. This give you many more options. You should only consider repeaters when you have absolutely no other option. They tend to be a huge pain to keep stable and the performance is not all that good.

hockey9592 · Nov 2, 2013

So I want an AP, another Access Point that physically connects to the main router? How much would this cost? Do I get just another similar router and connect them? My biggest problem is getting them to physically connect from from 3rd story to 2nd story

hockey9592 · Nov 2, 2013

A couple other possibilities that may or may not do anything. Would connecting two routers in the same location do anything? Also, what about purchasing another modem? Having two modems and two routers, different locations of the house

bill001g · Nov 2, 2013

Getting the ethernet cable is always the hard problem with using AP. Almost any router can be made to act as a AP. There is a sticky on this forum telling how. Real dedicated AP tend to cost a little more because most run on PoE. This is mostly for business application where you need lots of AP but putting electrical outlets to plug them in ends up costing more than the AP. A inexpensive router is your best bet since when you run as a AP most the fancy firewall and vpn things are of no use.

Connecting multiple routers in the same location unless you are very careful just increases the interference. The most common reason to do something like that is to get more total bandwidth. Since you can allocate some machine to one router and some to the other and they can use different radio channels. Still it has no effect on the coverage it just give more capacity in the same area.

It depends what kind of modem....still the answer is mostly no. A cable modem there is a slim chance you can make it work but the main downside is the cable company will want a second monthly fee. DSL you would have to have a completely separate phone line again for a added monthly fee.
If you have multiple location moving your modem to the second floor may partially solve your issue.

If you have coax cable I would see if using MoCA type devices is a option.

hockey9592 · Nov 3, 2013

I have never heard of MoCA. What about a router signal booster that would physically attach to the router to increase signal strength? Something like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833995088&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-pla-_-Wireless+Accessories-_-N82E16833995088&gclid=COSW-6jQyboCFQcSMwod_wkA2A

bill001g · Nov 3, 2013

It is mostly smoke and mirrors. The output is legally limited by the FCC. These guys already put that in the add. BUT the part that is false is them saying that routers transmit at low power. Most routers transmit at the legal maximum just like this device. You can if you put huge antenna on routers violate the laws and increase the power but it does little good. It is only half the issue you would have to put big antenna on both ends and its kinda hard to put a 3ft antenna on your cell phone. Also there is a reason every manufacture is using 3-5db gain antenna. It is a optimum match to the radios that are used, it has the best transmit as well as receive. It also has been optimized to allow the mutli antenna configurations required to run mimo which is what gives you the 300m and 450m data rates.

Still even this will likely not help in your case. The problem is routers are designed to concentrate the power horizontally and you want the signal to go vertical. This is why you see this question so often from people in multistory houses. You could to a point use antenna oriented the other way but the end devices too are designed to favor horizontal signals.

I guess you could try directional antenna on both end like you would use outdoors to go long distances. They are allowed to transmit at higher power levels and the narrow beam might allow them to penetrate farther. Hard to say the good ones are kinda big for use inside the house and there still is no guarantee they will penetrate the floor/ceiling. They put low UV coatings on the windows where I work and we discovered it also almost completely blocks the wireless signals outside the building...which is considered a good thing. You can easily see though them so it does not take a lot to block wireless signals. If you want to try it Ubiquiti sells a number of products designed for outdoor use. Could be kinda expensive if it does not work.

sg4rb0 · Nov 4, 2013

hockey9592 :

Hi,

It will cost around £80-£100 for two AP's. You don't need cables to go from the wireless router to the APs. You can just put an AP on the 1st story, and AP on the 3rd story, and use the wireless router on the 2nd story. You can then bridge both APs to the router . Because the distance between each AP and the wireless router is only one story, it should be a fairly decent connection.

If the connection is still bad, you can just use a directional antenna on the AP's instead of the antenna they come with. An example of this can be found here:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Alfa-APA-M05-7-dBi-gain-directional-panel-Wi-Fi-antenna-w-RP-SMA-connector-/130767354003?pt=US_Directional_Network_Antennas&hash=item1e72577893

Alternatively, you could just buy these directional antennas for the computers and it will basically have the same effect

Ufada · Mar 27, 2014

I found the best results would be placing your Router in Basement. I have tested similar setup by placing the router on first floor and second floor. But found having Router in the basement achieves the best results. There might be some corners will have lower signal, but overall, your connection should be fine for the whole house.

hockey9592 :

Router Suggestion for 3 Story Home

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