I have a new client that has a rather large home. Due to the construction of the house, running ethernet is not an option. The husband and wife each have offices that are on opposite sides and different floors of the house. Currently they have a Linksys router attached to a cable modem in one corner of the house. The wireless signal barely reaches the other corner of the house on the same floor, which is their family room, but I need to get a signal to the husbands office which is in the basement below that. I've got a DLink signal booster/repeater I am going to try, but I'm not really liking the idea as its another device to sit somewhere and when they lose power I don't want them to have to mess with it. Are there any suggestions? I see some of the newer routers have 3 antennas and claim to be more powerful and designed for larger homes/offices, but I'm not sure if this is hype or not.
MIMO is nice to have, but I would simply set up a small switch, connect it to the main router and put cables to strategic points where I would install Access Points in AP mode.
that is the most correct setup and the most resilient as well, since a power outage will simply make the whole system restart
No wires allowed. They just finished a long and expensive remodel and do not want any wires running anywhere and do not want the hassle of having wires pulled. I setup a spare WRE54G booster than I had to see how it would perform. It gave me decent coverage to where they wanted it, I'm just a little nervous about the reliability of it. These folks don't care what it costs, they just want it to be unobtrusive and problem free.
I've only setup single AP's before in homes and small offices and it always has seemed like there's a little to much left to chance. "Well, I plug this in here and we'll see how it work". I guess I'm asking for best practices. How do I determine, in a reliable and repeatable way what I need to do it right and which hardware is bulletproof. I've mainly used Linksys, Dlink and Netgear, but none of them seem particularly reliable as I have had to replace all of them at least once. I'm looking for business-class reliability. Basically all I did was walk around with my laptop and watch the signal strength. I then picked a central location and plugged in the booster to see how it would work.
with no wires, you can set up a stronger antenna or a MIMO router, but that will still not work well through the flooring.
another idea is AP in repeater mode, which, in theory, should work. but it loses connectivity all the time and is very unstable.
I have set up a huge penthouse a couple of years ago, where the owner didn't want any wires as well. two floors, 18 rooms. installed a router and 9 repeaters all over the place, some with directional antennas. after a few months of intermittent network losses, the owners agreed to install cables to the APs. and your home owner will agree too, if they want to have internet working normally
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