I have an older home with a basement and two floors above that I cover with two routers, both acting as access points, connected via Ethernet to a PFSense firewall in my basement. When my four kids are home from college, we can easily have 25 IP-enabled devices once you consider phones, smart speakers, desktops, laptops, and TVs. All of our things work just fine with the two access points.
I would think that if you could connect a router via wire (configured as an access point) to the existing router you have and place the new unit in the basement, you would likely remedy your situation. With the additional unit just running as a wireless radio (with the routing & DHCP disabled), you still have all devices on one network, so media browsing and printer access and any file shares you have will all work. Just let one unit perform the NAT/Gateway & DHCP role for your network and configure both wireless radios on the same SSID with the same password, so devices can roam between the access points seamlessly. Gibson On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 21:59 'Michael Chaney' via NLUG < [email protected]> wrote: > I have a confession to make - I haven't been paying attention to wifi in > the last 15 years. I typically wait until it's too slow then go buy what > seems like the high end of whatever netgear is on sale at best buy. That > has served me well for some years now. I now have a netgear R8500. I > don't remember how old it is but it's somewhat recent. > > My house is a rectangle that is 34' front to back and 76' side to side. > It's basically a ranch home with a bonus area upstairs and a full basement > below. The exact geographic center of the house is in a hallway, but > there's a coat closet just a few feet away from it. I have my cable modem > and wireless router mounted in the closet near the top of the closet. > > My office is in the corner of the basement as far from the router as I can > be - not because I want to be far away but because this is the perfect > office space. My wifi mostly works, but with the kids home from university > over the break I find my computer getting kicked off wifi a few times each > day. When that happens it generally won't find the router automatically > again so I have to enter the ssid and password again. When connected I get > full signal strength. > > Looking now, there are 18 wireless devices connected to the wifi and > another one or two that are probably just turned off. When my other kid is > home there are two or three more devices connected to the wifi. I've > noticed that when he's here I get kicked off more often. The router also > loses its wifi ability every couple of weeks when the kids are both here > causing me to have to reboot it to gain access again. > > What are my options if I want better coverage on all three levels of the > house and all corners of the basement? > > It seems I likely need a couple of routers that play nice with each > other. I don't want to get some sort of repeater that will simply halve my > bandwidth and rebroadcast packets up the line. I have a second wiring > closet upstairs with a switch and cat6 running to it. I plan on adding > another such setup in the basement. The point is that if I have multiple > wireless routers I'd prefer to be able to run cat6 to all of them so that > the packets never hit more than a single wireless router before going on > the wire. > > Suggestions are appreciated. > > Thanks, > Michael > -- > Michael Darrin Chaney, Sr. > [email protected] > http://www.michaelchaney.com/ > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CAAtfUtEXH%3DJEKPGRVRkpfKrkexZ_csMG_QZC7XUq0fYUq1CsWQ%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CAAtfUtEXH%3DJEKPGRVRkpfKrkexZ_csMG_QZC7XUq0fYUq1CsWQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Gibson Prichard Nashville, TN [email protected] 615-948-4609 -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CA%2BJ3mBB0mQCkYZFoR0aMiF3szczr8%2BpHjqHGuoiudzV3uAQ45g%40mail.gmail.com.
