Extender issue? Correct placement, strong signal, but intermittent and slow internet.

[SaltySeaGeek]

Hey Guys

I have been getting intermittent and slow internet from a wifi extender I recently bought, and wondered if anyone could help me work out how to address it?

Here’s the set up:

Netgear N300 in the upstairs bedroom, far left of the house. Put there by lazy cctv installers replacing our BT Home Hub and now can’t be moved or else we lose our cctv. It tranmits at 2.4 GHz. It covers the left half of the house (including outside (pointless) with strong, reliable signal (3/3) and 15mbps internet.

The entire right half of the house had very weak/no signal so I have installed a BT 1200 extender, connected via the wps button. These have a gauge on them to put them the optimal distance from the main router for best coverage. I have placed it halfway between the router and the right half of the house using this gauge so it is not too far or too close to the router. It also transmits at 2.4ghz.

Now on the right half of the house we have consistent wifi (2-3/3 bars) but it frequently loses internet. The signal is consistently strong but internet connection stops for 2-3 mins then resumes. Additionally the speed is between 50kbps and 6mbps, it’s all over the place. The extender is rated to 120mbps so the hardware capability shouldn’t be the issue.

To adequately cover the areas I need it to the extender has to transmit through 2/3 brick walls but only a short distance. This doesn’t affect the signal strength.

This extender needs to be used by an office where international skype calls are critically important and in the evenings is used for online gaming. The intermittency and speed fluctuation is causing problems for both of these activities.

Any ideas on what I can do to resolve this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

 

[bill001g]

You have the exact situation of why I always say you only use a wireless repeater as a last resort when any connection is better than no connection.

This is extremely common problem. These devices intentionally transmit a signal back into the exact same radio frequency they received it on. You will at the very least lose 1/2 your speed. You now have 2 radio signal subject to external interference and you have even worse issue with the end device not able to hear each other and will transmit at the same time even more.

This is they key difference between signal strength and signal quality. You now have a strong signal but it has lots of damaged data.

A better option tends to be powerline networks in these situations since they use the electical wires in the house which are unaffected by walls and floors.

If you must use repeater you need a real repeater. These device have a 2 radios. 1 only used to talk to the main router and a second on different channels to talk to the end users. This solves most the issues with the radio interference but these device are hard to find because the lazy customers are only looking at the 29.99 price of the cheap repeaters so that is what most manufacture provide.

A note....you need to disable the WPS. This allows someone to hack your wireless fairly quickly and there is no way to fix it other than to not use it. This too is a feature for lazy people. If your repeaters only support that mode and you can not manually configure the ssid and password you need to toss them in the trash.