- Jul 6, 2015
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I know this is a popular subject because I've read any number of posts and articles about it, but I find conflicting answers and the solutions I've tried aren't quite living up to expectation.
My house is spread out, and a central wifi router just isn't cutting it. When I've tried adding additional WAPs, they seem to act as independent hotspots. The problem is that say, I come home and park in the garage. My phone locks onto the closest WAP and tends to stay connected to that instead of jumping to the main unit in the house, unless I get involved or happen to go out of range of the first one. Ideally, it would just be one large network where it is just always connected to the best antenna without any interference from me. Or is this a pipe dream?
I have two Netgear Nighthawks, one is an R7000, the other an R6700. I tried following Netgear's instructions to make the second one a WAP, but my network barely worked after that, plus it stuck to the first unit as I described above.
On another front, I need a tool that tells me which device on my network is hogging all the bandwidth at any given moment. I have very little bandwidth, due to being in the country, and if say, my DVR decides to download a show, or my desktop is updating Dropbox, all the bandwidth is allocated to that device leaving almost nothing for every other device. It is a constant struggle to figure out what is the culprit at any given time. (Also, if it is the DVR, I need evidence to convince DirecTV it's misbehaving) Is there a router that can do that out of the box? I'm willing to upgrade routers if I have to. The Nighthawk really only tells me which of the 4 ports of wireless channel it's on. Since everything goes through a switch after the router, it's pretty useless. Or should I post this bit elsewhere?
My house is spread out, and a central wifi router just isn't cutting it. When I've tried adding additional WAPs, they seem to act as independent hotspots. The problem is that say, I come home and park in the garage. My phone locks onto the closest WAP and tends to stay connected to that instead of jumping to the main unit in the house, unless I get involved or happen to go out of range of the first one. Ideally, it would just be one large network where it is just always connected to the best antenna without any interference from me. Or is this a pipe dream?
I have two Netgear Nighthawks, one is an R7000, the other an R6700. I tried following Netgear's instructions to make the second one a WAP, but my network barely worked after that, plus it stuck to the first unit as I described above.
On another front, I need a tool that tells me which device on my network is hogging all the bandwidth at any given moment. I have very little bandwidth, due to being in the country, and if say, my DVR decides to download a show, or my desktop is updating Dropbox, all the bandwidth is allocated to that device leaving almost nothing for every other device. It is a constant struggle to figure out what is the culprit at any given time. (Also, if it is the DVR, I need evidence to convince DirecTV it's misbehaving) Is there a router that can do that out of the box? I'm willing to upgrade routers if I have to. The Nighthawk really only tells me which of the 4 ports of wireless channel it's on. Since everything goes through a switch after the router, it's pretty useless. Or should I post this bit elsewhere?
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