Question Boosting weak Xfinity wifi signal in a large house ?

[ROADSTIR]

I have a friend who lives in a large, very old home (late 1800's) and he had commercial Xfinity internet installed for his home's B&B. Unfortunately, the signal is abysmal and he can only get about 20-25' away from the router before the signal drops to 1 or 2 bars. We've tried wireless range extenders (pathetic). Could we run an ethernet cable from the router, to the basement and up into the living room/dining room area and connect a repeater/extender/WAP? I'm not super tech savvy in this area, but know my way around a desktop PC somewhat. What would be the best device to wire up to the router? Something that wouldn't be too difficult to configure and maintain. BTW, the walls are pretty thick in the house.

We had a tech company come out and wanted to put two mesh routers deeper in the house and wanted almost $k.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[bill001g]

Sounds like you were talking to a tech company that wanted to rip you off, or more likely just some incompetent person that thought they knew what they were doing. A mesh routers is the same thing as a so called range extender/repeater.

Your plan to run a wire via the basement is the best option. Using wired connection back to the main router is way commerical wifi is installed. You do not see so called mesh in corporate installations.

It is actually trivial once you get the cable run. What you want is to run a AP in the remote room. You do not actually need a real AP unless for example you want to power it over the ethernet cable. Pretty much any router can run in AP mode. The so called extender you already have also likely can be made to run as a simple AP.

You can make the SSID the same or different than your main router. If they are the same the end device will attempt to use the best signals. If they are different then you can manually control which if your devices connect to what radio source. A person tends to be smarter than the end device but some people don't want to deal with changing stuff when they move from room to room.

 

[ROADSTIR]

A couple of questions on your post concerning my friend's wifi problem-

Can you suggest a couple of WAP devices that might work without my being a wifi-genius?

Is there anything that's plug & play?

What might provide the most powerful signal? Actually, they are in their late 80's but financially comfortable. He would like to be able to use his iPad on the patio, which is right off the dining room where we want to place a WAP.

If this works well, can I utilize a second Ethernet port on the router and set up a second without changing anything

Many thanks for the advice,

David

 

[bill001g]

All router/ap more or less put out the maximum allowed legal power. The problem would be more the IPAD might not put out the maximum power to save on battery. So the signals could get to the device from the AP but not get back.

If you were to place the AP so you could see it from outside though a window that tends to be the best indoor placement. It is all the wood/brick etc that blocks the signal. Most glass unless it has special coatings wifi goes though easy.

Nothing is really 100% plug and play. I mean you have to go in and set things like passwords on any device. Your best option is to buy a inexpensive router and run it in AP mode. Almost all modern routers have this, some call it bridge mode. Still if you have a so called range extender already it may be worth reading the documentation it is highly likely that device can run in AP mode. I guess the only exception would be if it is one of the so called extenders that does not have a ethernet port.

I would just set the SSID and password the same as the main router if you want it simple. In most cases the end device is smart enough to always use the best signal. Even if it does not pick the "best" signal that is more a requirement for someone who need high performance out of the network. Something like web surfing or watching youtube it doesn't matter.

 

[drivinfast247]

Xfinity offers pods for a mesh network. Call them.

 

[gggplaya]

Running ethernet down through the basement and back up is the best idea. Wired backhaul is the most reliable.

For the 2nd floor you can use MOCA if the house was ever retrofitted with cable tv.