Question Losing wireless

[Timchi29]

Hello. Have a wifi problem. My home network is in a 1st floor closet as is a cable modem to wireless mesh router and then ethernet to cisco switch, where I have various devices plugged into. If I plug into the switch, I'm at 520mbps, or wifi is 490mb in closet. When I go to 2nd floor, I drop to 200mbps plugged into wireless mesh router or 180mbps wifi. My house is only 1800sq ft, but obviously being in a closet seems to be a problem. Any recommendations on a wireless mesh brand that can push out a stronger signal (with ethernet ports in back)? Today I have the Rockspace Wireless mesh.

Thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Can you please mention the make and model of your Mesh router? When wireless signals are made to penetrate materials, they incur degradation. Can you provide a floor plan for your abode? It's also a good idea to see if you can place the wireless mesh router at the center of your abode, both vertically and horizontally.

 

[Timchi29]

The brand is Rockspace. Customer service is the worst ever...


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V38NGRC/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_dl_WQJ6WCJJ1THDKXRZH52Y

 

[Timchi29]

The brand is Rockspace. Customer service is the worst ever...if you go to Amazon, just type "rockspace wireless mesh" and it's the 149 one. Tried to paste the link, but it was flagged.

 

[Timchi29]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Can you please mention the make and model of your Mesh router? When wireless signals are made to penetrate materials, they incur degradation. Can you provide a floor plan for your abode? It's also a good idea to see if you can place the wireless mesh router at the center of your abode, both vertically and horizontally.

So the mesh router is in the center of the first floor and all the ethernet cables on the 1st floor go to into the closet. I could probably move the router out of the closet, but it would be further away from the rooms upstairs that have the other mesh units. Unfortunately there is no way to install cat5 upstairs.

 

[englandr753]

If funds permit it, I would consider getting a repeater or if you have an old router that's not extremely old you should be able to turn off ssid and set it as a repeater to "throw" a stronger signal to the devices on the 2nd floor.

My nephew had a weak signal to his tv for streaming and I had a router I had just retired and it was the same model as his primary router. I was able to do this and it fixed the problem. Everyone has different hardware and different variables so this may or may not work but would be worth a try.

 

[bill001g]

You may not be able to fix this. There is no magic router that can send signal through walls better. Since router manufactures in general do not make wifi chipset they all buy from the same 2-3 companies. These chipset generally put out the legal maximum power. Pretty much only things like travel routers that run on batteries do not put out maximum power. So your current routers likely is already sending maximum. The problem is more likely your end devices do not put out the maximum power.

Do you have coax cable in the closet and some place upstairs. You can use MoCA instead of a ethernet cable and use a another router/ap upstairs to provide the wifi. Normally I would also say to consider powerline networks but if you already get 200mbps the powerline tends to be less than that.

The large problem with wifi is to get fast speeds they have to use very complex data encoding. The most complex data encoding only works close to the router and the farther away the more the router has to drop back to simpler encodings. This is partially why wifi6 does not get the numbers they pretend. It tries to use a very dense encoding called QAM1024 which pretty much only works in the same room.

 

[Timchi29]

You may not be able to fix this. There is no magic router that can send signal through walls better. Since router manufactures in general do not make wifi chipset they all buy from the same 2-3 companies. These chipset generally put out the legal maximum power. Pretty much only things like travel routers that run on batteries do not put out maximum power. So your current routers likely is already sending maximum. The problem is more likely your end devices do not put out the maximum power.

Do you have coax cable in the closet and some place upstairs. You can use MoCA instead of a ethernet cable and use a another router/ap upstairs to provide the wifi. Normally I would also say to consider powerline networks but if you already get 200mbps the powerline tends to be less than that.

The large problem with wifi is to get fast speeds they have to use very complex data encoding. The most complex data encoding only works close to the router and the farther away the more the router has to drop back to simpler encodings. This is partially why wifi6 does not get the numbers they pretend. It tries to use a very dense encoding called QAM1024 which pretty much only works in the same room.

My house is jacked up, or I guess it's more the previous owners. I think they tried to pull the coax out or something, because it's all cut at the ceiling of the crawl space and no way to get to it. I tried to use the same hole with a fish tape to pull a cat5, but no luck. I'm relying on wifi for anything upstairs.

I didn't know if there was a more powerful mesh that could solve the problem.

 

[Timchi29]

You may not be able to fix this. There is no magic router that can send signal through walls better. Since router manufactures in general do not make wifi chipset they all buy from the same 2-3 companies. These chipset generally put out the legal maximum power. Pretty much only things like travel routers that run on batteries do not put out maximum power. So your current routers likely is already sending maximum. The problem is more likely your end devices do not put out the maximum power.

Do you have coax cable in the closet and some place upstairs. You can use MoCA instead of a ethernet cable and use a another router/ap upstairs to provide the wifi. Normally I would also say to consider powerline networks but if you already get 200mbps the powerline tends to be less than that.

The large problem with wifi is to get fast speeds they have to use very complex data encoding. The most complex data encoding only works close to the router and the farther away the more the router has to drop back to simpler encodings. This is partially why wifi6 does not get the numbers they pretend. It tries to use a very dense encoding called QAM1024 which pretty much only works in the same room.

So I moved the router out of the closet and basically near the base of the stairs to 2nd floor. Hard wired to the mesh node upstairs the speed increases from 200mbps to 265mbps. An increase, but a far cry from the 515mbps that I get if I plug into the mesh downstairs directly plugged into the modem.

 

[Timchi29]

So I moved the router out of the closet and basically near the base of the stairs to 2nd floor. Hard wired to the mesh node upstairs the speed increases from 200mbps to 265mbps. An increase, but a far cry from the 515mbps that I get if I plug into the mesh downstairs directly plugged into the modem.

And one last test...I moved the 2nd mesh within 5' the primary and while plugged into 2nd mesh, I was at 440mbps. When I move 5' further around the corner in the kitchen, it drops to 386. Fyi...while plugged into primary mesh, I'm at 520mbps. So I didn't realize how much a wall or walls can drop the speeds.

Compared to the Rockspace Mesh I have today, is there another brand that is known to pump out a stronger signal to get get through walls, or is the 320mbps loss I have from 1st floor to 2nd floor probably the what it will be regardless. Glad I didn't go with the 100mbps plan!!

 

[bill001g]

I am somewhat confused by what you mean "plugged into".

If you use a ethernet cable from your pc directly into your main router you should get more or less what you pay your ISP for. It is possible to get a little more than 900mbps on a 1gbit plan. If you take a ethernet cable and connect it between the main router and a "mesh" unit and then connect a cable between your pc and the mesh
unit you still should get the maximum rate. The mesh unit is acting as a simple switch in that case.

If you are connecting between your main router and the mesh unit via wifi and then you plug a pc into the remote mesh unit with ethernet all you did was buy a expensive nic card. It really isn't much different than a nic card you connect with a USB cable.

You still have a wifi connection in the path and it may or may not be faster than a internal wifi nic card in your pc. Things like PCIE nic cards many times use the same wifi chips as the routers. Problem is the antenna are located very near the metal case in a lot of cases.

There is no magic device that can exceed the government limits on output power. In this case it was easy to get the fccid of your units. Seem they are made by the same company that makes tenda and then they sell them for almost double the cost of the tenda units with the same exact fccid.

https://fccid.io/V7TMESH12

Although you likely have never looked at these reports before the summary part shows the output power is very close to the maximum level of 1watt of power. If you were to look up other brands of routers you will see numbers very close and small differences don't matter. Something as simple as a piece of paper in the path can drop 100mw off the signal levels.

I am somewhat surprised you get more than 300mbps on these units. These are using what most end device are which is a 1200 "number". These are big lies. First they add the 2.4g and 5g speeds together even though a single device can't actually use both. The 5g is actually 867 even though they round this up to 900.
Next they are adding transmit and receive speeds together. This is like calling a gigabit ethernet cable 2gbit. Ethernet cables unlike wifi are full duplex and can actually get those rates. So you cut the speed in 1/2. Next there is a lot of overhead in the transmission so your end user data can't use all the bits.

So even directly next to the router you might get say 400mbps. This just gets less and less the farther you get from the router and the more wall you have. It is fairly common for people to get about 300mbps on wifi with maybe 1 wall between.

Now if you were to use the highest end wifi6 devices that support 160mhz radio channels you might get numbers closer to 600. This is purely because they are using more radio bandwidth not because the signal goes farther. In fact it goes less unless the router drops back to a simpler data encoding as you get farther away.

If you can get 300mbps on the second floor be very very happy. That is much more than many people can get.