Large home wireless router?

[relentless85]

I recently moved into a 3500 sqft home single story and my D-Link DIR-615 wireless router can not handle the whole house. I am looking to purchase a router that will do the whole home. I have been looking at 2 brands, linksys and netgear. What would you all recommend out of the brands listed? Or do you have any other brands that might be better? I have alot of devices that run off the wireless router, phones, multiple computers, bluray, xbox etc.

I was looking at the following:

Linksys AC1900, Linsys EA6200, Netgear AC1750, or Netgear WNDR-4000.

Thanks

 

[smorizio]

use a wireless repeater on the dead spot or one of those power over home wiring intenet ap for the other side of the house.

 

[relentless85]

use a wireless repeater on the dead spot or one of those power over home wiring intenet ap for the other side of the house.

I have heard that using one of those wireless repeaters that plugs into the AC outlet can slow down the speed. Would buying 2 wireless routers and setting one of them up as an extender be a better setup? I have had a couple of people tell me to do that.

 

[bill001g]

It depends what you mean "extender". The idiot manufactures have made a big mess of things with inconsistent terms.

Anything that takes wireless in and sends a copy of it out wireless in a effect to increase the distance a signal travels is a repeater. These devices at a very minimum cut your speed by 50% and many times much more.

The best way to "extend" your network is to use ethernet cable and put a AP on the end of the cable. AP are technically a repeater because they "repeat" the signal from the cable to the wireless. This is a very poor choice of terms because a dumb 4 port switch would also be a repeater. AP on ethernet is what is used in every corporate installation there is and it works extremely well. Of course the problem is getting the ethernet cable in a house without tearing out the walls sometimes. What people try to replace the ethernet cable with are powerline adapters. These in theory use the electrical wires in your house as the ethernet cable. You still use a AP to provide the wireless to the end user machines. How well powerline works varies a lot from house to house.

Unless you get very lucky with the placement in your house a single router will likely not cover the whole house at an acceptable signal level. Almost all better routers will have exactly the same signal levels and coverage.

.....a small update. 802.11ac only runs on 5g and 5g has much less coverage in your average house because it is absorbed more easily. If you cannot use 5g then you are wasting your money with 802.11ac since you can only run 802.11n on 2.4g

 

[Don Julio Anejo]

Powerline adapters work just fine and don't slow anything down (I don't even know what you mean by "can slow down the speed".. do you mean bandwidth? Then no, they work around ~200-300 Mbit, 5-10 times faster than your typical internet connection.. if you mean latency, then that depends on the state of your wiring).

There is a possibility powerline adapters won't work at all, given the wiring configuration of your house (they have to connect to circuits that come out of the same meter and breaker box, for example), but without poking holes for ethernet cables, they're still your best bet. Some of them even come with wireless extenders built in, if not - buy a cheap router (or use your existing DI-615).