Best Access Point for a Wide, Strong Signal?

Can anyone recommend a wireless access point (router not required) with a strong signal for a reasonably large house? I'd rather not use multiple access points if possible. Is there a current 'king of the hill' in this regard?

Thanks in advance!

No-one?

If the size of the house or the construction of walls and floors are such that you need multiple access points, then that is what you need. In other words, there isn't a magic access point that makes your client devices work differently or makes the walls transparent.

In particular just turning up the power does not overcome obstructions.

However

If you are only having weak signal in a particular part of the house and your router is not centrally placed, a directional antenna may help because in the direction of the gain it may improve both send and receive.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 07-Jan-13 20:38:39)

I get good coverage from a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND.

Thanks for the tips. Basically, a Netgear access point is nearly doing the job at the moment, but there are a few black spots. So, my thinking is that a top-quality access point should do the trick. I would just rather not find it by trial and error I don't need a router as that needs to be off in the garage for reasons I won't bore you with, then we have ethernet running to the house where the access point lives.

As other suggest, it is unlikely.

Most WAPs run at full power and need to radiate that in every direction. You could find one with an external antenna connection, fit it it the loft and choose an antenna with a hemispherical coverage pattern - that might gain a couple of dB but might create more blackspots.

You could get one with three fixed antennas and tweak those around on the chance it might work, but it might not.

You could get two "identical" WAPs and find that one has great coverage and the other is no where near as good. There can be 1 or 2 dB difference in output power.

Why not get a second WAP - you already have Ethernet around the house so fitting a second would be easy and if loss of a socket is a problem wthere are WAPs which also act as small switches with 2, 3 or 4 additional posts.


In my house, I am currently running three WAPs - and a fourth will be going in this week.

MHC, many thanks for the reply. To clarify, I have ethernet from the garage to a single port in the house (not ideal, I know) so it's not possible to hook WAP up to ethernet. I guess the other option is to extend the wireless coverage, although in the past I've found that a bit flakey.

Is there an access point you'd recommend if going the repeater route? What do you use yourself?

I use 2wire 2700 and 2701 hubs with DHCP turned off - so they just sit on the network and act as WAPs.

You could get a small 8 port switch and install that on the Ethernet port in the house and then connect a WAP to that along with your PC &c.

Are you on ADSL or VDSL/Infinity?

Cool, I'll look into those. I already have a switch from the one port (to which the existing WAP is connected), but that's at one end of the house, so I really meant that it wouldn't be possible to add another WAP connected to ethernet at another end of the house. Running cables isn't an option. I'm on ADSL.

What about a pair of powerline adapters to provide a link to where you can install a second WAP.

Reason I asked about ADSL/VDSL is te router location - but not relevant with ADSL.