Repeater without losing bandwidth?

[qwertyjjj]

is there anyway to extend a wireless signal around a house without losing half the bandwidth?
ASAIK any repeaters cut the bandwidth in half

 

[bill001g]

Not with the cheap repeaters most people are buying. You need a repeater 2 radios one for the primary signal and a second for the repeated signal. These are tough to find since they all pretend to do this function. The key way to tell is if you can set different channels and SSID on the repeated signal.

The cheaper way to do this is to build your own. Buy either 2 cheap routers that have bridge and AP function or buy a bridge and a AP. You use the bridge to connect back to the primary router and the AP to provide the signal to the end devices.

You still will get some increase in latency since the signal has to be received into a buffer and then retransmitted. Technically you are still using double the bandwidth but now it is on 2 different radios and channels

 

[qwertyjjj]

Not with the cheap repeaters most people are buying. You need a repeater 2 radios one for the primary signal and a second for the repeated signal. These are tough to find since they all pretend to do this function. The key way to tell is if you can set different channels and SSID on the repeated signal.

The cheaper way to do this is to build your own. Buy either 2 cheap routers that have bridge and AP function or buy a bridge and a AP. You use the bridge to connect back to the primary router and the AP to provide the signal to the end devices.

You still will get some increase in latency since the signal has to be received into a buffer and then retransmitted. Technically you are still using double the bandwidth but now it is on 2 different radios and channels

What's the difference in bandwidth usage?
Why does a cheap repeater use up half the bandwidth whereas a bridge does not?

 

[bill001g]

It depends how you define bandwidth.

Using the 2.4 band as a example you have 3 usable channel groups. 1,6,11 So you have let say 150m per channel...kinda a lie...

The cheap repeater only has a single radio so it can only run on a single channel. Let say 1. So you are dividing 150m in half and the other 2 channels 6 and 11 are not used for anything ...well your neighbors may use them.

Now if you use a bridge and a AP and you place them on the same channel there is no advantage; but because there are 2 radios now you can place the bridge on channel 1 and the AP on channel 6. You now have a total bandwidth of 300m but you still have to send the same signal twice, ie the bridge to the router and the AP to the client. So from client to router your effective rate is cut to 150m.

So technically you are still cutting the bandwidth in half but you are using more to start with.

 

[qwertyjjj]

It depends how you define bandwidth.

Using the 2.4 band as a example you have 3 usable channel groups. 1,6,11 So you have let say 150m per channel...kinda a lie...

The cheap repeater only has a single radio so it can only run on a single channel. Let say 1. So you are dividing 150m in half and the other 2 channels 6 and 11 are not used for anything ...well your neighbors may use them.

Now if you use a bridge and a AP and you place them on the same channel there is no advantage; but because there are 2 radios now you can place the bridge on channel 1 and the AP on channel 6. You now have a total bandwidth of 300m but you still have to send the same signal twice, ie the bridge to the router and the AP to the client. So from client to router your effective rate is cut to 150m.

So technically you are still cutting the bandwidth in half but you are using more to start with.

so it only affects the bandwidth on the wlan?
If you have aninternet pipe of 30Mbps, I was under the impression it would be cut to 15Mbps.
But then the actual WLAN by itself should be operating around 140Mbps+ shouldn;t it, so it would only be cut to 70Mbps, which is still double what the iternet pipe allows.

 

[bill001g]

Yes it has no impact on the internet. The problem is that it is half in best case.

Because of how wireless works only 1 single device can transmit at a time. You now double your change of devices talking over each other which degrades the performance even more. Running a repeater on the same channel is the same as adding another PC to the network. It really depends on the traffic. Things like games or video streaming that send packets at a regular interval tend to be the worst things to try on a repeater system

 

[fred3]

With typical commodity routers this is the case as has been pointed out. Perhaps the easy way to think of the situation is this;
The "repeater" router, having only one radio (i.e. tranceiver), can either transmit or it can receive at any instant. It can't do both because it's own transmitter would have such a high signal level in the receiver as to render the receiver useless.

So, it has to receive data half the time at the full bandwidth "B" and transmit it half the time at the full bandwidth "B". So, going through a wireless hop will reduce the overall data rate achieved to B/2. Anything other than half the time for each will either cause data loss or dead time.

Today, with dual-band devices readily available on the market, it's possible to use one band range (e.g. 5GHz) for one-to-one links and the other band range (e.g. 2.4GHz) for subsequent access point operation without loss of data rate as forced by a single transceiver.