Problems setting up a WDS

Hi All,

I've been sitting at this one for several nights and haven't been able to get my WDS going. Here's the basic setup:

TC 3rd generation with wired connection to a cable modem -- WDS main
TC 1st generation -- trying to be WDS relay (or that's what I had intended)
AE (one of the latest, 'n'-capable, anyway) -- trying to be WDS remote

My setup is that the main TC is in a room at one end of the house and I'm trying to get good wireless connection at the other end, about 20 meters away, but with some walls in between. I had planned to put the relay TC somewhere in between, but also to use it to allow ethernet connections to other appliances, such as an ATV2 and a BluRay player. I've recently read, however, that a relay station won't supply any wireless services, but will (as the name states) only relay the wireless signal to the remote station. Is this true or can I get it to supply services along the way?

I've followed a lot of good (or at least well intended) advice and have managed to set all three devices to 'participate' in the WDS network, the main TC's light is now green. However, as soon as I enter the Apple IDs of the relay and the remote stations, the main TC complains that it can't find any remote WDS stations(both of them blink amber) and it itself goes amber.

I've also read a lot about what wireless mode the stations should be in. All of them should be 'n' and downwards compatible, so that's what I've set. I've removed the main TC's guest network as I expect this might be a factor because the other two don't support this (or would they, if the main TCs is providing it?).

Can I use the 5 GHz capability of the main TC? What specific settings do I have to be aware of? I realize the bandwidth will suffer with a WDS, but I can't think of any other way to effectively distribute my wireless network from one end of the house to the other. Setting all stations to 'extend a wireless network' just seems to cause havoc and my iPhones won't connect, supposedly because the 3 stations are "competing with each other"...

Can anybody give me a "dummy proof" instruction on how to set up a WDS, please? Happy to supply more info if there are any questions that might help solve this one. Would really appreciate some guidance. Thanks!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1), x 2

Posted on Sep 8, 2011 12:17 AM

17 replies

Sep 14, 2011 1:04 AM in response to Roger Kaufmann

Just a brief update for Bob & Tesserax:

I yesterday received five Devolo dLan 500 AVplus EPRs and have installed three of them. There's a marked increase in speed for sure and the wireless seems to be performing better, too, although the reasons for this escape me for the moment. Is there any generally available tool that might be able to show me the speed? Obviously, iStumbler won't work (even though that shows some improvement, too) as I'm now running a mostly wired network...

One issue I'm having with the accompanying Devolo software is described here, but isn't really all that relevant to this thread.

Tesserax

Level 10

158,274 points

Sep 14, 2011 8:49 AM in response to Roger Kaufmann

Is there any generally available tool that might be able to show me the speed? Obviously, iStumbler won't work (even though that shows some improvement, too) as I'm now running a mostly wired network...

Actually, a great free utility to measure actual throughput (data transfer rate) is AJA System Test. You can use this utility to generate a temporary file that can be read/write to both local or network drives to get the "speed" of the connection in MBps. It measure throughput, regardless of the connection media.

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Problems setting up a WDS