Wifi in large cat5 wired house

amallon

I'm trying to help a friend get decent wifi through-out his ridiculously sized house.

He has his main BT router in a coms cabinet under the stairs and cat5 cables going from there to each room in the house.

I picked up 4 of these tp-link range extenders without doing my proper research
http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/?model=TL-WA730RE

User Man
http://www.tp-link.com/resources/software/20104239332114.pdf

I assumed I could stick one of these into a room with weak wifi and connect it via ethernet to the router and it would extend the wifi. Unfortunately it will only connect and extend an existing wifi signal. The ethernet port is only for configuration or for use when in AP mode I think.

I'm seeing some weird behavior. When I walk into the house it connects fine but when I move to another area it stays locked onto the original signal which has got weak and doesn't connect to the stronger signal in the room I'm in.

I look at the wifi analyzer app on my phone and I can see the same SSID appearing a few times on the same channel with varying degrees of strength which I what I would expect (each extender in range appears). My devices stay connected to the weaker source until I disable wifi and renable it. When I do this I can browse the web perfectly.

As well as hopefully the answer to the question above I'd like to know what would have been the best way to crack this problem and the hardware that I should have used.

TIA
Aidan

PogMoThoin

amallon wrote: »

I'm trying to help a friend get decent wifi through-out his ridiculously sized house.

He has his main BT router in a coms cabinet under the stairs and cat5 cables going from there to each room in the house.

I picked up 4 of these tp-link range extenders without doing my proper research
http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/?model=TL-WA730RE

User Man
http://www.tp-link.com/resources/software/20104239332114.pdf

I assumed I could stick one of these into a room with weak wifi and connect it via ethernet to the router and it would extend the wifi. Unfortunately it will only connect and extend an existing wifi signal. The ethernet port is only for configuration or for use when in AP mode I think.

I'm seeing some weird behavior. When I walk into the house it connects fine but when I move to another area it stays locked onto the original signal which has got weak and doesn't connect to the stronger signal in the room I'm in.

I look at the wifi analyzer app on my phone and I can see the same SSID appearing a few times on the same channel with varying degrees of strength which I what I would expect (each extender in range appears). My devices stay connected to the weaker source until I disable wifi and renable it. When I do this I can browse the web perfectly.

As well as hopefully the answer to the question above I'd like to know what would have been the best way to crack this problem and the hardware that I should have used.

TIA
Aidan

Ap mode is what you want, where it connects to your existing router by cable. Configure it with the same ssid and give it the same encryption key but make sure to set it to a channel well away from the existing.

amallon

Thanks I'll give that a go. I'll have my router and 3 access points. How many channels apart do they need to be. If I put the router on Ch1 and the AP's on Ch5, CH8, and Ch12 would that work?

amallon

Cheers PogMoThoin that worked a treat.

PogMoThoin

Be careful using channel 12, anything set to USA region won't see it as they only use 1-11. The 3 non overlapping channels are 1, 6 and 11, you could recycle one of the channels if it's not in range of the existing one.