WiFi Mesh

I’ve always had spotty wifi coverage in the house. I can put the router in the back of the house, in the den that was added on outside of the original brick walls, which makes the signal weaker in the rest of the house, or I can put it in the living room, which is in one corner of the house and the signal doesn’t reach well to everywhere. In March 2019 I got a 802.11ac router that seems to have helped and I moved the router to the living room where it can be connected directly to the TV and DVD player, giving me great coverage if I am in that room, but weaker coverage for the TV in the back of the house and my laptop. One feature of the TP Link AC1750 Archer A7 router is it can support range extenders that create a mesh. There are a few different ways range extenders can work. One way is they create a new wifi network that relays stuff back to original wifi network. But if they are meshed, there is just one wifi network all over. I have pretty low speed internet service at 30 Mbps, but the router can support much higher than that, supposedly up to 1750 Mbps. One problem with a range extender is that if you are downloading 25 Mbps (for streaming a 4k movie) from the extender, it has to get 25 Mbps from the original router and can fill up you bandwidth passing that along. So I have a lot of extra room in the local wifi signal.

The extender has to be in range of the original router to talk to it. And you want a strong signal. I was able to actually plug the extender into an outlet in the back room and still read a strong signal, so I think it must have pretty good antennas, plus the router and extender are both by TP Link (the extender is a $30 RE220 which supports 750 Mbps 802.11ac). It seems to work, but for some reason, my Roku box in the back room was still saying the internet signal was poor and I had to turn it sideways to get it to fair. That seems off because the TV gets a great wifi signal. The Roku is really small and I just don’t think it has great reception, but it is nice because it supports 4K apps, while the Amazon Fire Stick does not and the TV, which is 4K, has apps that don’t support 4K for some reason.

I thought if this works well, I could maybe get another extender (you can add up to 3) that would cover the other side of the house from the living room, but so far the coverage seems okay.

I decided to do some tests with and without the extender. One thing that I have used before is the Netflix network checker under Get Help. I have a Netflix app on the Roku box that connects to the TV in the back room as well as the built-in Netflix app on the TV. Here is the connection speed I got:

	Without	With Extender
Roku	0.561	30.22
TV	29.37	29.65

That shows a dramatic improvement with the Roku box, but when I plugged the extender back in I still got the low speed again for a little while and on about the third try it picked back up. Maybe it would have done that without the extender? I doubt it, but the TV got full reception either way.

Another check was running speedtest.net’s app on my iPad in different places in the house. More weird data:

	Without	With Extender
Den	29.8	30.0
Bedroom	20.8	13.8
Office	29.7	29.7

This shows worse connection speed from the bedroom while the extender was running in the den. Not sure what is going on, but I checked it again and got a similar result.

The last test I did was to download a file from my MyCloud server connected directly to the router in the front of the house, downloading to my notebook computer in the den where the extender is located. The MyCloud is horribly slow. I downloaded a 400 MB file and it went about 5 times faster with the extender running. This is a good test in that it isn’t limited by the slow speed of my internet connection to the house, but not a good test because it is limited to the slow speed of the MyCloud. Later on I moved the extender to the guest room to see what kind of boost I would get in my bedroom if I got another extender and got a very good improvement again.

400 MB download	Without	With Extender
Den	304 seconds	94 seconds

Bedroom 395 seconds 74 seconds

I probably need to set up more tests. One good test would be to copy a file from one computer on the network to another which would bypass the very slow MyCloud and maybe give me a better idea about the speed.