Looking for a new Wifi setup

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Aeronyx

Commendable
Aug 7, 2016
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Hey! I'm looking for a new wifi setup, as the title would suggest. By "setup," I mean a new router and extenders. Currently, I live in a rather small apartment with an Apple Airport Extreme and a few Airport Express extenders. The hardware we have is pretty old, and really a pain in the ass to mess with. (the modem works fine, it has several computers connected via ethernet and delivers constant fast speeds.) Also, our biggest problem: the wifi constantly drops and won't reconnect. The only solution seems to be waiting for a long time or restarting the router. Sometimes the Expresses disconnect, laptop won't connect, etc. It's been plaguing our family for quite some time now, and we're ready to spring on a new wifi system for the holidays. Any suggestions on a reliable new system for the apartment?

Aeronyx
P.S. I've been looking at Google Wifi, and if that is the best option, do I need to get a router + Google Wifi's access points, or can one of Google's access points be used in place of a router (connected directly to the modem)?
 
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Before buying anything, you should check your RSSI and channel congestion (and ideally post it here). Some links to Android apps are below (Wifi Analyser is good for checking RSSI, and WiFi Overview 360 is good for looking at available channels.) If you see your RSSI is weaker than -65 dBm or thereabouts, you might have a signal strength issue. But if it's stronger than that (-50 dBm, say) and there are several neighboring routers' SSIDs on the same WLAN channel as your Airport Extreme, then you might have an issue with congestion. Wifi is a listen-before-talk protocol and small apartments stack on top of each other are going to have to listen for a long while - maybe long enough to cause packet loss - before transmitting.

I don't know...
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vmfantom

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Nov 28, 2017
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Before buying anything, you should check your RSSI and channel congestion (and ideally post it here). Some links to Android apps are below (Wifi Analyser is good for checking RSSI, and WiFi Overview 360 is good for looking at available channels.) If you see your RSSI is weaker than -65 dBm or thereabouts, you might have a signal strength issue. But if it's stronger than that (-50 dBm, say) and there are several neighboring routers' SSIDs on the same WLAN channel as your Airport Extreme, then you might have an issue with congestion. Wifi is a listen-before-talk protocol and small apartments stack on top of each other are going to have to listen for a long while - maybe long enough to cause packet loss - before transmitting.

I don't know why you'd need range extenders in a small apartment. Is that really necessary to cut your throughput in half just to add a bit more signal strength for yourself, and more interference for yourself and all your neighbors? Was the RSSI weaker than -65 dBm before you added those extenders?

It's somewhat likely that the problem is destructive in-band interference either from the AE extenders or from neighboring routers. So before recommending a new router, it'd be very helpful to know whether either RSSI or congestion are likely culprits.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keuwl.wifi
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.android.wifiscanner
 
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Aeronyx

Commendable
Aug 7, 2016
27
0
1,530


Thanks for the help! I just checked the signal strength, and there are some decent RSSI numbers (averaging out to around -50 dBm), but the real takeaway is what you said about congestion: there is way to much going on on the network. Too many devices, and too many different access points. I'll take some of those off and see what that does for the connection.

- Aeronyx
 
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