No wireless connectivity with Range Extender or Router in Repeater mode

dsmith43

Honorable
Jan 25, 2018
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I've possibly got a difficult question to answer. So I have two wireless IP cameras, whose signals were degraded when I moved my computer into a spare room on the other side of my condo. Using the camera's IP Monitoring tool, I noticed the signal was cutting in and out every few seconds. It was driving me crazy.

So I went out to Best Buy and purchased a TP-Link range extender and set that up with 2.4G and 5G and everything connected to it, including the cameras.

But then all of a sudden my other wireless device signals started to degrade. For instance, I have a wireless media centre PC, an old Dell Inspiron computer that I've had for years, works just fine as a media centre PC, and I run Plex server on it so that when I'm on the road taking a break I can watch whatever is on it. Now I can't even connect to it, and other than adding the extender, nothing has changed.

I was talking to a colleage about this, and he told me that maybe I should consider setting up an older router as a wireless access point or a repeater to extend the signal range. I have one of those old Linksys WRT54G routers with 2.4G that I flashed the firmware from dd-wrt.com because it doesn't have its own built-in Repeater settings, which worked OK when I did it, and didn't care if I ruined it while upgrading the firmware.

So last night I spent a few hours setting it up, all seemed OK, the old router is connected to my main router, the IP address is in range, and I still have no signal from my media centre, and I can't get Plex on my iPhone to connect with my media centre.

I'm going to try unplugging the TP-Link extender tonight and remove the old router and see if that brings up my signal strength, but I just know that my IP camera signals will be degraded again. They're the only things that seem to be working around the house!

Anyone have any ideas?

Dan
 
Solution
I use to use a Linksys router and a Netgear Extender. It worked fine when configured properly.

I now use a pfsense box and the Netgear WAP with Netgear Extender. Still functions just fine.

You listed your old router but what is the model of your new router? The issue could be channel conflicts or other wireless compatibility related problems.

On my Netgear Extender I played it in AP mode then configured both 5.0 and 2.5 channels to the same SSID as the wifi from the WAP. This way i have seemless wifi.

Just remember some cards are not 5.0 or 2.5 compatible, so making it seemless will let the device auto decide its best wifi connection type.

You can also try downloading a wifi analyzer app on your phone, connect to the wifi and walk around your condo with the app on and running. It can help track down channel conflicts and dead zones. You may need to adjust the channels and move the extender into a better spot.
 

My new router is a TP-Link AC1750. I'll have a look at the channel configuration tonight when I get home.


This is good advice, I've just download a few Wifi analyzers on my phone. Is there one in particular that will show me where my conflicts are, or do you suppose I should just select a few analyzers and see if I get what I'm looking for?
 
There's an Ethernet port in the bottom of the range extender that I discovered I can plug my old router into, to extend the 2.4G wifi signal, but that doesn't seem to be working very well. On my iPhone, tv shows still buffer on my wireless media centre and I can't log into my server on plex.tv.

I think I'm going to return this range extender and get the AC1750 model, the next model up. It's a bit more expensive, but you get better throughput, then I probably won't need my old router.
 


A range extender would add latency and cut throughput in half, so if the spot where the extender is already has very weak signal strength, it's doing nothing to help. So let's say the signal strength (RSSI) from the router is -73 dBm at the spot where you have the range extender. The router is probably only able to modulate 54 Mbps on 5 GHz there. So the extender would cut that to 27 Mbps or less, and then the throughput falls some more over distance between the extender and the connected devices. So you can do the math as to whether it's enough throughput for your devices. A range extender can't reclaim throughput, it only can reduce it. You can't make ice cream from horse poop. And to be clear, every other device communicating in band adds congestion, and has to wait its turn to transmit on the same channel. Those packets are scheduled based on a contention window, so the more interference there is, the longer they wait to transmit, and the less throughput and packet delivery you get. The extender is an expensive noisemaker.

If by "TP-Link AC1750" (AC1750 is the chipset) you meant the Archer C7 router, hopefully you didn't buy v2. (Check on the bottom to see the version number.) The transmit power on 5 GHz from that model is about 1/7th as strong as other brands' 3x3 MIMO routers, like the D-Link DIR-880L or Netgear Nighthawk R6700. You should buy a decent router like one of those instead and maybe you wouldn't need a range extender at all.
 
Solution