Best strategy to extend WIFI coverage in the whole house

Technical Support for Routers
1

Dear experts,

I need some advice to improve the WIFI coverage in my house.

The current situation is the following:

Currently I use a GL-X750. This router is connected to a LTE network and provides both 2.4G and 5G WIFI networks for all the WIFI clients in the house. I live in a house with 3 floors (basement, ground floor, 1st floor). The GL-X750 is located on the ground floor. Due to massive concrete walls and ceilings, the WIFI in the basement and on the 1st floor is pretty poor.

Therefore I thought about placing one repeater in the basement and one on the 1st floor. At the beginning I thought about getting two mini routers like the GL-MT300N or GL-AR300N for this purpose. However since they only support 2.4G WIFI, this would not be ideal, right? If the communication between router and repeater is on the same band as the communication between router and the clients, I assume that would lead to a degredation of the bandwith for the clients. Is this assumption correct?

If my assumption is correct, could this be improved, if I use a dual-band travel router as repeater? Can they be setup in the following way: the communication between the GL-X750 and the dual-band repeater (e.g. GL-MT1300) happens on the 2.4G band, but the clients connect to the 5G WIFI network, that the repeater provides?

Is this possible with your dual-band travel routers? Is there a guide, how this scenario can be set up?

Is there any model you can particularly recommend for the described scenario? Or are all dual-band travel routers “compatible” with the GL-X750?

In case I plan to upgrade my LTE router to a GL-X3000 in the future - would you recommend that I choose a WIFI 6 travel router (e.g. GL-MT3000 or GL-AXT1800) as repeater already now?

Thanks a lot in advance for your recommendations.

Best regards,
Sebastian

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Hi @sb11 , these are my favorite questions :).

A repeater in my opinions is just a temporary fix. As it literally connect to the main router like any other device and repeats that signal. If you have 3 devices connected to the main router and 1 repeater. The repeater will get an aprox. max 25% of the max throughput. If 5 devices are connected to the repeater wach of them have a max of 5%. These are all aproximates. But I hope that you understand that this has a great impact on your network.

The best scenario is to have one router which connect to all secondary routers/accesspoints using ethernet cable.

But it is not always feasible to make holes in your walls. If this is the case I recommend using power line adapters. These are not as great as an ethernet cable but work great. Some of then even have an accesspoint function. Just plug one adapter in a socket near the primary router find another power socket that is near the accesspoint/secondary router but which uses the same group. If you have found a suitable socket plug the second adapter in and connect both adapter to their respective routers. Voila you have ethernet over the power line.

Your routers shoud be perfectly fine! You just need to connect them properly.

1 Like
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One of the technical mishaps in todays consumer wifi hardware is the absence of good antennas.

The most consumer hardware has only some “electrical traces” on a PCB as an antenna:

See for yourself in picture #1:

https … www … symmetryelectronics … com/blog/internal-antennas-different-types-and-advantages-symmetry-blog/

What you want is something similar to this:

https … www … kleinanzeigen … de/s-anzeige/1855741260-225-8251

So, either you you connect via cable, as Riktastic has already explained … or you look out for good external antennas to increase coverage and stability of the local wifi signal of your router.

As you see in the 2nd URL, those antennas dont have to be expensive.

Also, you dont need 5GHz, in fact, 2,4GHz has the better ability to penetrate walls, floors and ceilings (Physics: the 2,4GHz wavelength is longer and isnt absorbed so easily).

The biggest difference between “simple 2,4GHz” and “dual-band with 5GHz” is the ability to have more radio channels in parallels to archieve higher bandwidth … up to 1300 Mbit/s.

If you are OK with lower bandwidth like 150 MBit/s … which is propably enough for high-end video streaming, then you are good to go with simple 2,4GHz and 2xMIMO.

This will reduce the costs of routers and also antennas, as they dont have to be “dual-band” …

If you are into DIY and capable of basic soldering, then I can recommend the youtube-channel of Andrew McNeil, who is an engineer and discusses many antenna designs in his videos.

Making your own omni-directional antenna is no magic with costs of 10 Euros per antenna.

“Dipole Antenna for 2 4 ghz Wifi”
https … www … youtube … com/watch?v=bs8hvXGJdhM

“Omnidirectional Biquad Antenna for 2 4GHz”
https … www … youtube … com/watch?v=4t6OliwhJ5g

Sorry I had to obfuscate the URLs … this is because I am a “new user” and are allowed to post two URLs only … :frowning:

4

I have a similar use case. When you say to connect the routers using ethernet cables, what network mode (router, access point, extender, WDS) do you use for the non-main router? Are the wifi SSIDs set all the same?

Can this allow different wifi access points to hand off the signal, depending on the stronger signal?

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Access point is the right option to choose.
WiFi SSIDs should be the same.

Not really. This technology is usually only available on more professional devices, as roaming is required. This is often controlled via a special dedicated controller.

So yes, your device will choose the strongest signal - but stuttering can occur during the changeover. So it’s great for running around while watching YouTube, but bad for running around while doing a VoIP call.

6

I think here could be the solution: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/80211s

I got my Beryl AX to test, today. I hope this weekend I will have the first mesh and can tell if this will break the GL-iNet UI or anything else.
As far as I can see/read/imagine, the only downside is the missing view in the UI, but it should operate fine.