My wife, kids and I live in our current house for more than 6 years now. Since the beginning, in-house Wi-Fi has been a challenge. Our three-storey house has massive concrete walls and floors, and floor heating everywhere (which I suspect adds another barrier for the Wi-Fi signal). My Wi-Fi setup was as follows:
- A Cisco cable router with Wi-Fi disabled (because the Wi-Fi of this router really sucks) in our meter cupboard on the ground floor, where internet enters the house.
- A Linksys (Cisco) E4200 Wi-Fi access point on the ground floor, cable-wired to the router.
- A EnGenius ECB350 Wi-Fi client bridge on the first floor, cable-wired to the router. I used this device, because I could (illegally) boost the transmit power on this device by using the US settings (EU regulations are stricter on allowed transmit power than US regulations).
- A Linksys (Cisco) RE1000 Wi-Fi range extender on the second floor, not cable-wired.
The problem with this setup? The signal on the second floor was still way too weak to have a proper internet connection. The Wi-Fi signal on both first floor and second floor was quite unstable, I had to reboot access points at least once a week. Continue reading