Need Wireless N Repeater Advice

GHoosdum

I have a friend who lives in a nice, big, Southern CA style house. His office is on one end of the house, and his wireless signal only makes it about halfway through the place. The house is old, so there's no structured cabling, and no way to run an ethernet cable through the house, so I figured the best bet is to set up a wireless repeater for him.

Currently he has the very nice NETGEAR WNDR3700 as his primary router.

Anyone have any recommendations on what to pick up as a wireless-N repeater?

mirage

The same hardware and firmware usually works with least problems in wireless bridge configuration (i.e. another WNDR3700). Keep in mind that every repeater halves the wireless bandwidth.

Having said that, I am using two wireless bridges at home (Buffalo WHR-G300N) connected to a main AP (Asus RT-N12), all running DD-WRT.

GHoosdum

Thanks for the info, mirage.

Aside from bandwidth concerns, are there any other drawbacks to using it as a bridged network? For example, the WNDR3700 manual says you can only use WEP on a bridged network, which doesn't make any sense to me.

I considered recommending the same router to him as the repeater, but it's pretty expensive, and has some features (like the shared USB port) that the repeater won't need. Any alternative routers?

I also considered using the powerline adapters and simply setting up a separate network in the other end of the house, but I've heard bad things about the adapters overheating easily. Any thoughts?

mirage

I think WEP limitation is due to factory firmware since I am using WPA2/AES combination here with DD-WRT. There is no special configuration on the AP for the wireless bridge connection when I use DD-WRT. The wireless connection of the bridge is treated just like any other wireless client on the AP. But you will need to configure the other router for the bridge and repeating function. If the AP is configured for WPA2/AES, bridge is setup with the same security. In my opinion, WEP is not an acceptable option. If that WNDR3700 was mine (wishful thinking ), I would be running DD-WRT on it. And, if the WEP limitation has not been resolved in a later factory firmware revision, I recommend the same to you.

I agree that a second WNDR3700 can be expensive. Since WNDR3700 has an Atheros chipset, choosing another simpler Atheros router might be better. In that case, I would recommend Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N; it has Atheros chipset, is cheaper, and is DD-WRT compatible.

I am using the wireless bridges as client bridges; client bridge does not accept wireless connections only wired. Since there is no wireless repeating, the wireless bandwidth is not reduced. It is ideal for connecting multiple computers close together without hogging the wireless bandwidth. For example, my Mac and PC share the same wireless bridge, and our XBOX360 and PS3 do the same. It is two times more efficient this way since 4 WiFi connections will be adding two times more overhead on the bandwidth (802.11b/g/n protocol consumes a good percentage of the bandwidth above actual data transfer). Since my Mac and PC are on the same desk, client bridge is ideal. Besides they connect to each other (for file transfers etc) through the Ethernet switch without even using the wireless bandwidth.

I could not learn much about the powerline network beyond the high price of adapters

I hope these are helpful.

GHoosdum

Thanks for the help!

Missileman

I have a network setup for sharing with some of my block using these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833168045

I also have a WNDR3700 primary router. Be aware though that the WNDR3700's latest FW has some issues with WPA & WPA2/AES encryption. They work fine for a while and then lockout all the wireless stations. You can see this in the logs as it displays more rapidly occurring login attempts by wireless devices saying they failed passphrase checks until device gives up. Reboot router and everyone immediately logs back in. This happened with several brands of repeaters, APs, and even smart phones. I got around this by putting one of the EnGenius repeaters plugged into the WNDR3700 as an AP and turning off the 2.4Ghz channel on the WNDR3700 until they fix the FW. System works fine ever since with both G & N APs and devices hooking in.

My network covers a whole block of houses, both sides of the street using 2 of these as repeaters and 3 more as APs and my lowest signal is 68%.

GHoosdum

Whoa, thanks for the firmware heads-up! Unfortunately, he just upgraded the firmware to the latest version, so it seems that we'll be stuck with this problem until they fix it.