Wireless Range Expanders

[Wulfgang]

I recently moved into a house with five friends. The house is sizeable and the wireless signal does not reach from the Comcast router to one of the bedrooms on the other side of the house. We ended up buying a Linksys range expander to try to boost the signal to the far side; long story short, after properly configuring the booster to the wireless network, it now gives almost full bars across the whole house. The issue now is that the download speeds are 1/4 of what they were without the booster. Is there any solution to actually expanding the reach of your wireless signal without giving up quite as much as we are currently giving up? It takes me like 5 minutes now to download my POL messages on the login screen and I dont even have any messages.

[Vertabreaker]

I recently moved into a house with five friends. The house is sizeable and the wireless signal does not reach from the Comcast router to one of the bedrooms on the other side of the house. We ended up buying a Linksys range expander to try to boost the signal to the far side; long story short, after properly configuring the booster to the wireless network, it now gives almost full bars across the whole house. The issue now is that the download speeds are 1/4 of what they were without the booster. Is there any solution to actually expanding the reach of your wireless signal without giving up quite as much as we are currently giving up? It takes me like 5 minutes now to download my POL messages on the login screen and I dont even have any messages.

This may sound stupid but I had a similar situation a while back when I was in college. I lived in a huge house with a bunch of buddys and the signal wouldn't reach from my room to the other side of the house. We tried a booster but got the same results as you.

We ended up just getting a wireless access point(pretty sure it was a linksys) and putting it in the middle of the house. We covered the cat5 cable with area rugs lol but it did effectivly take care of the problem.

[Cephius]

I've had experience with a few range expanders and while I'm no expert they seem to be a waste of money to me. Yes, they do increase signal strength about an extra 50%, but computers that need to use the expander are having their wireless signal bounce off the extender and back to the router, creating considerable lag. My advice to you would be to return the expander and get a wireless-N router, they have vastly superior range compared to wireless A/B/G networks and are capable of transmitting faster speeds. The downside is they are not cheap, and you need to have wireless adapters on your computers that are capable of receiving a wireless-N signal. If this isn't cost-effective for you, do what the above poster suggests and run some cat5 and put the router in the middle of the house.