Quote:
Originally Posted by Fish
Anytime you use an extender, your transfer rates are cut in half from that extender. That's just a hardware limitation of extenders. Run cat6 to each floor. You can put a cheap switch on each floor at the end of the cat6 cable and have multiple ports. You could then also put individual access points on any floor that wouldn't cut the transfer rates in half.
|
Dane, what Fish described is by far the best option.
However, if you want a quick and dirty option, or if you can't easily run Ethernet cables to other parts of your house, you could always go with a power line adapter. It uses your home power lines as the physical network cable. I know, it sounds like a horrifically bad idea. When I first read about these things I thought it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard, but later I decided to give it a try. I have used them successfully to get decent network speeds on the second floor of my house (my Internet service is in my basement). You plug in the power line adapter close to your cable modem, and run an Ethernet cable from the modem to the adapter. Plug the matching power line adapter in on the second floor. Then you can either run an Ethernet cable from it to a cheap switch like Fish described for use by devices with Ethernet ports, or you can run it to a cheap wireless access point for use by wireless devices.
The main difference between a wireless access point and a router is that the router often acts as a DHCP server (it assigns dynamic IP addresses), and it can be connected directly to your ISP connection. The wireless access point doesn't do that. It just extends your existing network to wireless devices.