I am moving into a new home shortly. It's a very long ranch, and the incoming cable and router are located at one end of the house in my office. I would like to ensure that I get a strong signal throughout the entire home. Would a wireless bridge be the best solution? If not, then what would you recommend? If needed, I can run ethernet to any room in the home without much of a problem.

Thanks.

What kind of router were you thinking about using? I suppose if you were using Linksys, you could purchase few access points and then connect them via ethernet...

Why does it matter if it's a Linksys? You can run ethernet cables and have wireless routers everywhere tapping off the cable.

Netgear makes some wireless extenders you might consider, if you don't want to run cable everywhere. I had one of those, for b/g only, they are fine. I don't remember if they support anything besides WEP or not, and I think they are kind of pricey for what you get.

You can use an Airport Express as a wireless bridge or as a wireless extender. I have 3 of them at home, one creating a 5ghz n-only wireless network, the second one is a wireless n bridge on that network to my office (it connects to a switch in the office), the 3rd one is an older b/g only AE, that extends my b/g network downstairs.

In order to use the Airport Express as a wireless extender, you need a base station (router) that implements WDS. The Apple base stations implement it, of course. Also, DD-WRT implements WDS, at least the version that I have did, and it works fine, once I figured out how to configure it. IIRC it wasn't hard to do. You have to enter the mac address of the base station in the extender and vice versa. I think the trick was to select LAN mode on the base station's WDS tab, where you enter the extenders mac address, and to remember that you can only run WEP with WDS.

You can also pick up anything that will run DD-WRT and turn it into a wireless bridge.

-David

I picked up an access point off e-bay for like $15 or something like that. It's connected to the other wireless router all the way across the house by an ethernet cable. I have a dlinl one, but for example this one is $20 on e-bay

http://cgi.ebay.com/54-Mbps-Wireless...8#ht_500wt_975

It could also function as a range extender, but since it was fairly easy to run the cable (I had to run a phone one anyways) I went AP mode.

The added advantage is it gives me coverage outside on the patio too.

If you can easily run a wire, I would just do that, and get any wireless router that can function as an access point, or just an access point and use that.

Without a ton of setup it won't be totally seamless, it is way easier to have the two of them setup with different ID names and on different channels. So in essence I have two wireless networks in the house.

After doing some research, it looks like a router installed with DD-WRT has the capability to run as a wireless repeater. And it looks like the setup is fairly simple to do. It does knock your bandwidth down by half because the repeater uses one half bandwidth to communicate with the primary router, and the other half for users. I think I can live with that...

Thanks for all the responses!

Excellent, and that makes sense too.

-David

The standard linksys firmware also supports running in repeater mode... or you can run ethernet to multiple routers.

Main difference is that if use use wireless repeaters, the routers need to be much closer together (and therefore you may need more of them).

If you set it up to repeat, each device must be in range of it's neighbors. If you run ethernet, the signals have to overlap, but each device can be out of range of its neighbor.

If running Ethernet wire is not that big a deal, I'd just run a wire to a second router half-way down the house that's hooked up to the first router. Not crazy about losing 1/2 capacity because of repeater feature...

I would definitely just go this route if running cables is easy to do. Either run a cable to a midway point and put your router there and check signal strength, or router at one end, run a cable from one of the outputs there into the input of a second router. Make sure DHCP is OFF on the second router.

If your router has detachable antennas, get yourself a high gain antenna or 2 which will focus broadcast/reception on those areas of the house where you will be.

Wireless has it place but a hardwired (cable) system
will be more reliable and faster.


Wireless is sexy but is more expensive and can be spotty
even at close range.


For travel have you looked at the MiFi wireless router?

I agree, if you are okay running the cable; do it. Also, you should be able to configure both APs with the same SSID. Just make sure both have the same security settings/password configured. Even cheapo Linksys APs will support seamless roaming between APs.