Wifi range extenders

[antongould]

I don't know if these have had a mention before but my daughter persuaded me to buy some when they were on sale in Bainbridges, sorry John Lewis, as she claimed they were excellent. Well it had to happen I suppose but a daughter was right!!
In our vast house, joking!, previously if your moved away from the mother ship in the lounge the bars on the signal strength started to fall and upstairs was a bit feeble. So I followed the instructions and plugged the extender in at the top of the stairs and the improvement is very significant. For some reason not just upstairs - as I type this in the back garden I am listening to tonight's Prom on the old ipad. It's going to rain.......

[teamsaint]

good heads up there, AG. We all need extra techno wizardry.

I wonder if your new "never knowingly underpowered" toy can help the signal traverse La Manche...........

http://www.naturalnews.com/043695_electrosensitivity_wifi_french_government.html

[Nick Armstrong]

my daughter persuaded me to buy some ...

How many did you get?!

... I followed the instructions and plugged the extender in at the top of the stairs

So you've used one... And the others?

This place is rather elongated and since the switch to BT, the internet router has been located right at one end. No signal got through the walls to the back of the flat... and a Netgear router solved the problem a few years back.

However there is a massive drop in the speed. Before the recent upgrade (see separate thread), the 10Mbps signal became about 1Mbps when using the extended network. Now with the Infinity 75Mbps signal, it's better with about 10 Mbps making it through the extender. Do you find this, anton?

If not, I would appreciate details of the make and model number of your many extenders, Mr Gould!

[antongould]

Sorry sir I only have one, a TP-LINK TL-WA850RE. I haven't really done any measurements pre and post but now I use iplayer without any worries/problems all around the estate! The only pain is granddaughter seeing the flashing blue lights likes to press the reset button.

[Nick Armstrong]

Sorry sir I only have one, a TP-LINK TL-WA850RE. I haven't really done any measurements pre and post but now I use iplayer without any worries/problems all around the estate! The only pain is granddaughter seeing the flashing blue lights likes to press the reset button.

I'm obliged to m'landed friend

[Flay]

Now with the Infinity 75Mbps signal

BT are giving me about 1.2 megawossits. I'm probably paying about the same for this disservice.

Talk about the privileged in the cities and us lesser mortals in the sticks

[Nick Armstrong]

Talk about the privileged in the cities and us lesser mortals in the sticks

Mayonnaise or ketchup with that chip, Dr F?

As hinted in my post, this is a very recent development - see this thread http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...770#post417770

Central London has been the poor relation for a long time.

And can you get cable if you so choose? We can't!

[Dave2002]

BT are giving me about 1.2 megawossits. I'm probably paying about the same for this disservice.

Talk about the privileged in the cities and us lesser mortals in the sticks

Are you really a day's journey away from the exchange? Using the old fashioned ADSL BT did generally manage to push that up to nearer 3-4 Mbps, so if it's really a problem for you you should complain, and see if anything can be done to improve things. However, you might find that you measure different rates at different times of day - I assume that you are using something like http://www.speedtest.net/ [ignore any adverts or suggestions for speedup your kit you may see on that site!!!] to check your data rates. At one point when we were with TalkTalk we noticed that we got significantly poorer performance at certain times of the day, which we figured was due to the shared nature of the connections. Probably all the kids in the area got home from school and started playing video games, or watching videos. If that is the major problem, then it can perhaps be fixed by paying more for a more business oriented service with a lower contention ratio.

With ADSL, if there's poor performance it does help sometimes to swap the microfilters for new ones. Sometimes the "old" microfilters are faulty, while sometimes just putting in a different one will cause the line to reset and re-optimise, and there can be an improvement. Allegedly some microfilters are better than others. There are also fault conditions with ADSL which can arise due to the installation of fibre in an area. Sometimes they affect those who do not switch to fibre services. However, BT try to dissuade people from complaining by suggesting that "if we do not find a fault, and the fault is in your property, then you may have to pay a call out charge of £xxx", and a certain amount of stonewalling by the consumer is needed to get to the bottom of such issues. There are some faults which are very hard to detect. BT may deny this.

[Dave2002]

Central London has been the poor relation for a long time.

And can you get cable if you so choose? We can't!

It's not the only poor relation. There are still areas outside London where broadband and also mobile broadband are poor, and where cable is not available. I think that for some satellite may still be the best, but very expensive, solution. However, some users of expensive satellite services have now migrated to terrestrial wired services, as these have become available and improved in their regions.

[Dave2002]

Sorry sir I only have one, a TP-LINK TL-WA850RE. I haven't really done any measurements pre and post but now I use iplayer without any worries/problems all around the estate! The only pain is granddaughter seeing the flashing blue lights likes to press the reset button.

For caliban

I have never had too much luck with wireless repeaters, though that doesn't mean they don't work. Anton seems to have had success.
I would view the claims about (very) high data rates with suspicion, as unless they use cut-through routing the effective rate is probably at least halved.
I have TP Link devices which can be configured to do that job, but it's rather a pain, and as I've already said, I haven't had good results.

I have had quite good results with powerline adapters though - such as these - http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-PA41...=tp+link+av500
You plug one end into your router, and the other end into your target device, or if you want wireless at the remote end, use a wireless access point.

I am a bit surprised you have noticed a significant drop in throughput, even though that has recently gone up to 10 Mbps. Setting these things up can be a bit hit and miss. Generally I would prefer to use some form of wired connection, or powerline links, but in one location I looked at where I was sure that I would get better results with powerline links, when we measured the data rates wireless was just as fast - about 29-30 Mbps in both wireless and powerline configurations. That was with a Virgin supplied wireless router and a pair of TP-Link adapters as above.

Note some people are dead set against powerline - and possibly with justification, as there are claims of radio interference. However, it can work well - and significant interference isn't guaranteed. If you are living in a compact community though, you might manage to cause interference for your neighbours, even if it doesn't affect you.

Could it be that you got lower data rates by using a shared comms link? If you use wired connections from your router the router will probably try to allocate high speed links to all your devices, but if you use wireless, then the available channel capacity will be shared by all the devices you connect. It is perhaps a good idea to put devices with a high data rate requirement onto a wired connection for this reason, so that there is more to share out for the wirelessly connected units. Also make sure that your neighbours aren't accessing your network (somehow) and reducing the channel capacity for yourself. It has been known - sometimes even by accident. You do need to put the wireless keys on to reduce the chance of that happening.