tonyart

Q: Wireless network over three floors

I have setup an apple wireless network over three floors the apple extreme base station is on the 2nd floor. I have an apple express on the first floor which receives a good signal from the base station and there is another on the ground floor which basically only works about 5% of the time and never longer than about 5 minutes. I was under the impression that the express on the first floor would boost the signal from the extreme, thus enabling the express on the ground floor to receive a good signal. The distance between each device is no more than 4-5 metres. Is there way of getting this to work?

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on May 14, 2012 8:25 AM

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Q: Wireless network over three floors

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  • by Tesserax,

    Tesserax Tesserax May 14, 2012 9:56 AM in response to tonyart
    Level 9 (54,786 points)
    Wireless
    May 14, 2012 9:56 AM in response to tonyart

    In the older WDS configuration, you can have a main, relay, and remote base station. This would be the "ideal" configuration with the Extreme as the "main," the Express on the 1st floor acting as the "relay," and the ground floor Express as the "remote."

     

    However, this WDS configuration has two major drawbacks: 1) It can only operate in the 802.11g Radio Mode, and 2) For every base station used, the overall bandwidth is cut in half ... so with three, you are looking at a maximum bandwidth of around 10-15 Mbps.

     

    In a 802.11n Extended network configuration, your don't get the bandwidth penalties, but there is no "relay" option. That means both of the Express base stations are attempting to extend the Extreme. Since the ground floor Express is further away, the signal strength of the Extreme may be too low to extend the network with enough bandwidth to make it useable.

     

    Basically your options (beyond these) are: 1) Connect both Express base stations back to the Extreme by Ethernet (Roaming network), or 2) Employ Powerline adapters. These adapter take advantage of your home's electrical circuit to create a pseudo Ethernet one. You would place one of these adapters at the location of each base station and connect each by Ethernet.