router/repeater setup for my house

[Wd40]

I live in 5rm HDB it is quite huge like 1300sqft and it is a unit which has corridor inside, so there are lots of walls between my living room and master bedroom. So the wifi will just not reach the last 2 bedrooms. As it is a rented house, I cant do much changes like laying out a lan cables etc.

So I set up a main router which is DLink DIR 868L with a wireless repeater which is Linksys EA8100 actually router set to repeater mode. The repeater receives signal from the main router wirelessly and broadcasts it forward. 5ghz band acts as the wireless backhaul. Now I have good signal at the extremes.

This was my weekend project and pretty pleased with the outcome.
This is the actual layout of my house. Some ideas for you guys, if you have bad internet.



Before this also I had a router repeater setup, the repeater was Asus RT N56U and I was facing disconnections often, so the Linksys EA8100 replaced the Asus and I also completely changed my router repeater positions and the change of positions could have made significant difference. I brought the main router to as centre as possible by pulling the optical fibre cable to its max length.

This was the old placement which was bad.

[malcontent]

We have a 3br apartment which is even larger than that, and we only have one router, a cheap TP Link for $99 and it covers our whole home fairly well, we only start to lose signal strength at the extreme back corners of our unit.

I place our router up high near the ceiling in the living room, but in the middle, perfectly lined up to the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I suspect that placement makes the difference, but haven’t tried other positions.

[Wd40]

We have a 3br apartment which is even larger than that, and we only have one router, a cheap TP Link for $99 and it covers our whole home fairly well, we only start to lose signal strength at the extreme back corners of our unit.

I place our router up high near the ceiling in the living room, but in the middle, perfectly lined up to the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I suspect that placement makes the difference, but haven’t tried other positions.

Indeed, router placement is the biggest factor and ideally it should be placed in the center and best case is when there is a straight line of sight with no obstructions. The more the number of walls and the thicker the walls, the worse the signal becomes.

Since mine is a rented house, I cant really move the main router. So I have to resort to these workarounds. If it was my own, house, I would layout a lan cable terminal points to each bedroom and then place wireless access points there to get the best coverage with least amount of loss.

[x9200]

You solved your wifi puzzle correctly
The main principle is that the the transmitters and receivers should see each other with as few wifi absorbing objects (here concrete walls) as possible.

I have a very similar layout with a corridor like yours but have one of the BRs where you have your store at the end of the corridor. My main access point (AP) is placed in LR such so it "sees" the end of the corridor - just slightly further towards the entrance than yours. The repeater is in your store room separated from the AP only by the distance and a wooden door.

Some general remarks:
You can buy couplers for optical fibre and extend the line.
"Good signal" is not the thing to look for (within some reasonable range of course) but good throughput (achievable up/download speed). If you placed your repeater in BR3 you would have even better signal but the throughput would be worse.
5GHz bands penetrate walls etc. actually worse than 2.4GHz.