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I have a 3 story home. 802.11b in open family room. Dead spots in all the wrong places. Will an upgrade to 802.11g possibly help?
Thx
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but moving the router to a more centralized location or adding a WAP to the network may help. New devices on the market include wireless repeaters >>>>>
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1571601
The Router is in the most centralized place in the whole house. I have a very open floor plan.
OK, Let's say, I am in the same room as the router (Family room, approx. 15 feet from the router)and can't connect. I take it in the kitchen (same room just 10 feet further from the router)and I have no problem connecting and staying connected.
I did the upgrade and found significant improvement. However, I own an old house (built in 1903) and in original shape. The walls aren't wallboard; they are plaster over wire mesh to form the walls and signal strength was affected by the material as a whole despite relative closeness to the router. I switched to the Netgear Maxrange and am getting very strong to excellent signal throughout the three story house.
802.11g requires roughly double the signal strength at 12mb that 802.11b requires for 11mb. Different chipset implementations will vary of course.
If repositioning the router to a more central location doesn't work, check into MIMO routers from major mfgs. They typically offer increased range even for standard wireless-g network adapters.
As others have stated, adding a WAP to your existing router may be a desireble solution. Stronger antennas or adding a range extender/repeater may also be viable.
Do you have a cordless phone, TV or any electronic equipment operating in your family room?
The modem and router sit on top of my entertainment cabinet. There are several layers of wood between the first component and the modem and router. Phones are 5.4 gHz.
In my case MIMO did work very well.
I changed to a Linksys MIMO router with three antennea and the coverage improved dramatically. Even through several brick walls I get good signal strength (3 of 5 bars in the signal strength) and a connection at 11 Mbps.
We're in an old rock solid 3 story house too. From the technical material I've read, you will get the best wireless coverage if your transmitting router is in the basement.
Now, if that's not feasible (our situation), you would do well to get a MIMO-type wireless router and receiver like Netgear's RangeMax (or its even better success which just came out recently). Our notebook got lousy reception on the first floor and basement until we switched to Netgear's RangeMax equipment. Now the signal comes through loud and clear.
I understand that wireless equipment is starting to be released that is based on the new wireless N standard -- which should provide greater range, signal strength and security. Go to pcworld.com for articles on this. I'd recommend sticking with Netgear and avoiding Linksys whose technical support is unbelievably bad (as in just plain wrong advice, mislabeled firmware and application upgrades to download -- and a language barrier that makes it rough on customers who speak English as their native tongue).
i had the same problem.. so i did some research and i purchased a buffalo router (turbo g) and new cards for the pc's and i have not had a problem at all .
In fact now i have the folks around me wanting to hook up to my wireless as well but i have the ability to stop them with mac address filtering ..and another benifit was the router has intrusion detection and firewall.. ive had the laptop out in the yard and thought lets see how far i can reach i was amazed at the distance from the router and the strenght of my signal.
so do a bit of looking around and look for the advantages you want or need as all router are different.
hope this helped you out some
good luck
Thank you all for taking time out of your day to reply to my question.
I'm going with the Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO Router.
Just in case you want to put your two cents...
Do you think there is a diffence in quality among the manufactures? lets say Belkin, Linksys, Dlink, Netgear, etc.
Is one going to perform better than another even if it's the same technology.
I bought the Belkin pre-N MIMO router and notebook PCMCIA card to try to fix the same problem you're having...poor reception in a large, 3 story house. It fixed the reception problem very well, but the driver software was faulty. I could get 54Kbps on my laptop, but a desktop that I had hardwired to the router got slow transmissions (go figure!).
So I returned it and got the Netgear WPN824 and WG511T notebook card. It works great! Fantastic reception all through the house and beyond + fast (108Kbps) download speeds. I like the setup very much!
Just my experience.
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