Having more than one Ethernet port is great when using such devices as gaming consoles that are stationary yet beyond the router's range. You will have the option of connecting the devices to the booster for the most reliable throughput rate of data.
In case the Wi-Fi booster has a few ports, getting transmission with stationary devices could be hard. Virtually all the Wi-Fi boosters come with two antennas.
While one transmits, the other broadcasts the signal. Some have three antennas though where one captures the wireless transmission while the other two antennas are used to broadcast the captured reception further from the Wi-Fi booster. As a result, the range is increased. Antennas on the booster can either be internal or external. Note that antennas are also critical in helping to boost performance in other ways such as counterbalancing interferences.
Range increase in a Wi-Fi booster determines the reach of the wireless transmission. In case the living room and the kitchen are feet apart and the wireless coverage is only feet - A Wi-Fi booster will help to bridge the difference. This is why it is important to know the range of the Wi-Fi booster you have decided to take home. Most come with a feet average range increase while others even have thousands of feet range increase. Of course some have as little as feet range increase.
The Wi-Fi booster security is quite guaranteed. Wireless fidelity transmission is highly hampered by water. Any source of water at the office or home can bring about a poor wireless connection. Water as a dense matter diminishes wireless coverage transmissions considerably.
Even a person standing between a wireless device and a Wi-Fi booster can make the transmission to drop; the human body has lots of water. It means you can remove or switch things that could interfere with the reception such as flower pots, fountains, aquariums and furniture where people become an interference if they are in the way of the Wi-Fi amplifier and cellular devices.
Alternatively, you can actually get a weatherproof Wi-Fi booster to use even in your garden. A Wi-Fi booster is not hard to install. Find a location that receives the Wi-Fi network already present and connect the power supply.
Through your laptop, log into the Wi-Fi booster and add the login details, including the password of your present Wi-Fi network. This will allow the Wi-Fi booster to extend after connecting. Note that Wi-Fi booster installation takes just a few minutes.
It gives your home or office perfect Wi-Fi coverage. Remember that the best way of placing the WiFi extender is halfway between that area where the Wi-Fi puzzlingly disappears, known as the dead zone, and the router.
As such, your bandwidth and signal strength boosting will be immediate and will be pointed to the spot that is not getting reliable Wi-Fi. Some major providers like Cox Communications even recommend an extender as a quick and easy way to broaden the range of your signal. Many internet users have found Wi-Fi extenders to be a great solution to make their connection more reliable and help them change up the scenery when working from home becomes monotonous. Wondering if a Wi-Fi extender may be right for your home?
Here are a few reasons it might work well for you:. You picked the perfect, inconspicuous location to install a wireless router: downstairs in the family room on the entertainment center. But as anyone in an upstairs bedroom discovered, the walls and physical distance between the router and the people using it is too much.
The strong signal received close to the router will easily bounce coverage to the other upstairs Wi-Fi users. You may also be inclined to get a stronger home Wi-Fi plan. In the summer, we love spending as much time as possible outdoors, even if that time has to be spent catching up on some work. Limit the number of walls and barricades the signal has to cross. When it comes to extending that signal into a nearby outdoor spot, place the Wi-Fi extender in a room with an outdoor access point.
Follow all the same rules of keeping the signal as unobstructed as possible. No matter the reason you need a Wi-Fi extender — sluggish internet on the second floor or inability to drink your coffee and surf the web outside — remember that the location of your devices is everything when it comes to a strong internet connection.
Erin Gobler is a personal finance writer based in Madison, WI. She writes about topics including budgeting, student loans, credit, mortgages, investing, broadband and insurance. Including Allconnect. Read bio. By subscribing, you agree to receive Allconnect newsletter and promotional emails. Your privacy is important to us. Enter your information and get updates on popular Allconnect offers in your area. Why do we ask for your address? Need help? Speak to one of our experts.
Call: Data caps. See how they drop off in that back bathroom? The top chart shows you the average speeds in each room when I ran my speed tests on a six-year-old laptop with an aging Wi-Fi 5 radio.
All of the extenders boosted the back bathroom speeds for both of them, but some did a better job than others. If that back bathroom were, say, a back office, I'd be miserable -- but that presents a clear mission for my test extenders. Which one would provide the biggest, steadiest Wi-Fi connection boost to internet speed in the back half of my home? To find out, I plugged each range extender in one at a time and paired them with my router, connected my laptop to their extension networks and repeated my speed tests and then again on the iPhone, with Wi-Fi 6 in play.
I placed the extenders in the hall, halfway between the spots where I test in the hallway bathroom and the master bedroom, and close to the edge of where I'm able to hold a strong connection with the router.
A good range extender should be able to receive a solid signal from the Wi-Fi router at that distance, then beam its signal out farther than the wireless network could originally extend.
In the end, I ran a total of 60 speed tests for each extender, 30 to test its speeds to a Wi-Fi 5 client device and another 30 to test its speeds to a Wi-Fi 6 client device. With each test, I logged the client device's download speed, its upload speed and the latency of the connection, too. All in all, I tested six new plug-in range extenders over the past month.
TP-Link is the most notable brand of the bunch, as it makes and sells a wide variety of range extenders. This year, the company has three new models up for sale, including two that support Wi-Fi 6 -- I made sure to test them all, along with range extenders from Asus, D-Link and Netgear.
Speeds from each were more or less identical whether I was using my Wi-Fi 5 laptop or my Wi-Fi 6 iPhone, which makes sense given that the extenders were connecting to each of them using the same set of Wi-Fi 5 protocols. Speaking of which, the other four extenders each include support for Wi-Fi 6 and each of them provided performance that was superior to the RP-AC51 and the RE That's why Netgear's average speeds look so good in the living room the orange columns in the graphs above -- I was connecting directly through the router in the same room.
These graphs show the latency results for all six range extenders across all of my tests -- Wi-Fi 5 on the left, Wi-Fi 6 on the right. A steady ring that's close to the center is ideal here and most of the extenders nailed it, holding tight at 20ms or so.
But the Asus RP-AC51 red saw lots of spikes in both rounds of tests, with the average latency landing closer to 30ms. Just be sure that you also note that those speeds weren't as good as what I would normally expect from that router in the living room gray. In fact, the D-Link model essentially cut those normal living room speeds in half. EasyMesh is a useful feature, but you shouldn't expect perfect performance when two competing brands are forced to play nice.
It's not a disqualifier, but it pushes TP-Link towards the top spot since both of its Wi-Fi 6 extenders had no such trouble boosting speeds for Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 devices. That said, D-Link redeemed itself with superb upload speeds -- the best among all six extenders in my back bathroom for both Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 devices, the best throughout my entire house for Wi-Fi 6 devices and the second best throughout my house for Wi-Fi 5 devices.
I think it's more than enough oomph for most people, but if you make a lot of video calls or engage in other internet activity that leans heavily on uploads, consider spending up for the REX -- the moderate bump in upload speeds is probably the biggest difference between that one and the REX. None of the plug-in range extenders I tested in were able to hit blazing fast speeds -- but the TP-Link and D-Link models were able to sustain speeds in the back of my house that are easily fast enough for streaming HD video or making FaceTime and Zoom calls.
In , I tested four bargain-priced range extenders to see which one offered the most bang for the buck. It was the start of the pandemic and people were scrambling to bolster their home networks -- I wanted to be sure we could point them to a good, budget-friendly pick that would do the best job as a signal booster offering an extra room's worth of coverage in a pinch. I've separated these four models from the other six because the test setup was different in and it wouldn't be fair to make direct comparisons to those results.
The big difference is the router I used. Last year, in , I used the combination modem and router that came with my ISP plan and that one doesn't support Wi-Fi 6 at all. Here are my takeaways from the other three I tested:. With two adjustable external antennas, the D-Link DAP is pretty powerful for a budget-priced range extender, but it wasn't as consistent as our top pick.
D-Link DAP : This was the only range extender that ever managed to hit triple digits during my tests, with an average speed of Mbps in my bedroom during evening hours. Setup was just as simple as what I experienced with TP-Link, too.
I was able to stream HD video, browse the web and make video calls on the extender's network without any issue. Network speeds were inconsistent though -- and much slower in daytime hours, with a bigger dropoff than I saw with TP-Link. The device also dropped my connection at one point during my speed tests.
On top of that, the app was too finicky for my tastes, refusing to let me log in and tweak settings with the supplied device password. It ultimately forced me to reset the device. Software woes aside, the hardware seems good with this range extender and it has a dual external antenna setup.
Since it's not quite the newest model from D-Link, there's a good chance you can find it on sale somewhere. Netgear EX : It's a dated-looking device and it wasn't a strong performer in my tests. The 2. But the 5GHz band was surprisingly weak, often dropping into single digits with only a single wall separating my PC or connected device from the range extender. I wasn't a fan of the web interface, either -- it seemed more interested in getting me to register for the warranty and opt into marketing emails than in actually offering me any sort of control over the connection.
There's an app you can use instead, but it's only available on Android devices. By default, the device automatically steers you between the 2. The device supports automatic firmware upgrades, which is great, but you can't use the Linksys Wi-Fi app to tweak settings -- instead, you'll have to log in via the web portal. On top of all that, the RE seemed to be the least stable of all the extenders I tested, with more than one dropped connection during my tests.
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