My family currently has a wireless router setup somewhere centrally in the house.

The thing is, we have just finished renovating the downstairs as an entertainment room, but the wireless router doesn't have enough signal strength to reach down there.

Relocating the router to an even more centralized position is possible, but it also requires a good amount of work in order to make it look tidy (hide wires, drill holes, etc.).

Are there any alternatives to relocating the router to get better signal strength downstairs? Possibly linking wireless routers? Or even get a new router that outputs a stronger signal strength? FYI, our wireless router is a G+ router (108mbps) that is about 5-6 years old.

 

Check to see if tomato or dd-wrt is compatible with it. They allow you to adjust signal power beyond standard settings. Newer routers should have better signal strength, like the memo (sp?) Routers that came out a while ago, although I don't know too much about that stuff

 

they have signal boosters out there.

 

you mean MIMO routers?
I would suggest adding a Netgear wireless bridge/access point to get more coverage or upgrading to a rangemax N

 

Belkin make's great n+ router for 129.99, is pretty good.

http://www.belkin.com/IWCatProductPa...duct_Id=509867

 

how about putting about wireless box downstairs and connect it to the first one with an ethernet cable...

 

yo! my buddy is poor and his dad wont pay for internet. He got tired of going in the backyard to get the signal, so he got a lil thing that attaches to his laptop and is a little dish. Its super light, at first I assumed a pos but it works very well. ill find the brand out tomorrow but id recommend it or something similar.

 

I use two airports to extend the signal around the house.

 

+1 for adding a secondary wifi router to act as a wireless bridge/access point

 

You can use a 2nd router as a signal repeater. I am using this at my house. In theory it should be a bit slower but at least you will get solid signal and there is no wiring to mess with.

 

Or you can just get a signal repeater.

 

Are these bridges/repeaters easy to setup? I'm pretty computer savvy in terms of hardware, but not really wifi.

Thanks all for the responses!

 

What will you be using the wireless for? PS3? HDTV devices? If so, forget wireless all together and put a wired switch there. If you still need wireless, you can put an AP there as well.

Our whole house here has two gigabit drops in almost every room (office has 4, kitchen has 0 ) which makes it easy to setup wireless as needed on each floor. One AP upstairs at one end of the house and one AP downstairs at the other end. You can use free wifi channel finders to find the least used channel for the best signal on Android phones (free) and they probably have a paid version for iPhones.

 

After battling with a similar situation on a 5+ year old Netgear 802.11G router, I just decided my time was worth enough to buy a new one.

Got a dual band 802.11n netgear dsl modem/router for $95 at Fry's (http://netgear.com/Products/Wireless.../DGND3300.aspx). Allowed me to cut down from two black boxes (at&t dsl modem & netgear router) down to one, and have an up to date N-speed (150+ mb/s) wireless network in my apt for media sharing & gaming between my PC and Xbox. Ran some Netflix on the xbox last night, was flawless with the router. Not getting website drop-offs anymore either.

 

I'm going to be using it to stream Netflix on a Wii that I got my dad for Father's Day, so the connection will be pretty demanding.

I'm still unsure and confused about how everything can be setup. Do you guys mean that I can just buy another wireless router, and link them together? For example keep the one I have and put a wireless router downstairs?