I have a primary router centrally located, but a few corners of my house have terrible coverage, so on speedtest, for example, I'm down to around 1-3 mbps.
Bought an Asus RT-N10P router and as a repeater it was utterly worthless. It seemed to setup right, but no matter where I placed it (near device, in middle of device and primary router, etc. nothing seemed to matter) I couldn't get any device attached to it (gave it a separate SSID to be sure I was on it) to do any better than without the repeater at all.
So I put it into AP mode, wired it up to the main router. I've put it on the same SSID as the main router. inSSIDer is showing it up fine and it's auto-picking a lower-traffic channel. It's being issued an IP from main router, and all devices on either router can talk to each other. So, two slightly weird things I noticed:
1) When I go to this AP router's admin section I see all clients on the network. I kind of would have just expected to see those connected to its wireless network, but everything connected to main router also shows in this thing's client list (and so in truth I cannot even tell what is "connected" to this vs the main router). So, both routers show all clients (IPs for all issued only by the main router).
2) I was near my main router and presumably connected to it wirelessly. I walked to a far corner of the house where this AP is and speedtest dropped down to 1-3, showing I was still connected to main router. If I turned off my wifi on my device and immediately back on, only then was it smart enough to attach to the AP's better signal, and speedtest ramped back up to full. Is this normal; how often do devices search for better channels among networks all given the same SSID?.
All that aside, using this as an access point is working pretty well. Wish I'd done this a while ago.
One last stupid question: When a device is on my network, it's connected to either the main router or the AP, but is there any scenario in which range can be extended by throwing multiple routers into something and having them work in parallel? By this I mean if you had a few next to each other can they all work in concert, essentially sending out the very same signal at the same time as if the multiple antennas on each router were part of just one super router? Similar to a crap load of speakers on low volume, all next to each other, having a combined much larger volume? Yes, I hated the frequencies part of my physics courses.
Bought an Asus RT-N10P router and as a repeater it was utterly worthless. It seemed to setup right, but no matter where I placed it (near device, in middle of device and primary router, etc. nothing seemed to matter) I couldn't get any device attached to it (gave it a separate SSID to be sure I was on it) to do any better than without the repeater at all.
So I put it into AP mode, wired it up to the main router. I've put it on the same SSID as the main router. inSSIDer is showing it up fine and it's auto-picking a lower-traffic channel. It's being issued an IP from main router, and all devices on either router can talk to each other. So, two slightly weird things I noticed:
1) When I go to this AP router's admin section I see all clients on the network. I kind of would have just expected to see those connected to its wireless network, but everything connected to main router also shows in this thing's client list (and so in truth I cannot even tell what is "connected" to this vs the main router). So, both routers show all clients (IPs for all issued only by the main router).
2) I was near my main router and presumably connected to it wirelessly. I walked to a far corner of the house where this AP is and speedtest dropped down to 1-3, showing I was still connected to main router. If I turned off my wifi on my device and immediately back on, only then was it smart enough to attach to the AP's better signal, and speedtest ramped back up to full. Is this normal; how often do devices search for better channels among networks all given the same SSID?.
All that aside, using this as an access point is working pretty well. Wish I'd done this a while ago.
One last stupid question: When a device is on my network, it's connected to either the main router or the AP, but is there any scenario in which range can be extended by throwing multiple routers into something and having them work in parallel? By this I mean if you had a few next to each other can they all work in concert, essentially sending out the very same signal at the same time as if the multiple antennas on each router were part of just one super router? Similar to a crap load of speakers on low volume, all next to each other, having a combined much larger volume? Yes, I hated the frequencies part of my physics courses.
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