Expanding

buxtahuda

Baseband Member
Messages
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Alright, as the title suggests, I'm expanding. What I'm expanding is a wireless network that will reach across a few residences in a neighborhood. The main household is my brother's; the cable modem and wireless router are there at his house. He has a basic Linksys cable modem, running to a Linksys WRT320 wireless router. Our house is about 130 feet away; we know his router reaches to the back corner of our house and yard, but we need it to reach through the house and with decent signal. So would just using a simple repeater be better, or should we use a bridge?

A bridge honestly looks to me just like a suped up wireless adapter; if we wanted to actually extend the distance of the wireless network we would use a repeater right?
 
I'd recommend a repeater yes. It will pick up the signal and rebroadcast it again (thus generating a better signal).
 
A repeater will cut your speeds in half litterally, so If you want good speeds I reccomend a Ethernet bridge hooked to your own wireless router. That way you get good speeds and you can hook more than one device up wirelessly and wired via Ethernet.
 
A repeater will cut your speeds in half litterally, so If you want good speeds I reccomend a Ethernet bridge hooked to your own wireless router. That way you get good speeds and you can hook more than one device up wirelessly and wired via Ethernet.

Really, I did not know that. Thanks for the info.
 
Really, I did not know that. Thanks for the info.

Yeah neither did I until a few weeks ago, instead of using a repeater in my house I just set up another Access Point. Allot cheaper too the way I did it and if you don't have Ethernet you can just run a wireless bridge as I said. keeps your speeds fast. Just have to make sure that your Ethernet bridge is resonably fast as the weakest link is generally whats going to slow things down. What I have set up is:

108mb/s router (Netgear rangemax)
^
*Backhaul link at 108mb/s*
V
108mb/s bridge (The bridge is actually a laptop with an N card until I get a real bridge but the card is rated up to 300mb/s so the WRT54g acting as an AP is in some cases faster than just connectiong directly to the netgear for some reason crazy...)
54mb/s router (Linksys WRT54G)

That way the backhaul link while wireless has speeds similar to ethernet (Ethernet is 100mb/s) so long as no one puts a brick wall up I get pretty solid speeds.
 
Repeaters can work to a certain extent, but you may well notice they do more harm than good because they work on the physical layer - they've got no idea of what data is being transmitted, they essentially just take the physical signal and amplify it. Great if there's not much interference and the signal's just degraded a bit, but if there's a reasonable amount of interference around then that gets magnified as well which can really muck some devices up!

Bridges on the other hand work on the next layer up, the data link layer - so while they don't understand protocols or anything like that, as long as they can read the data they can just boost / retransmit that, cutting the stray interference out.

Routers and similar (read: stray laptops with wireless cards ;) )that work on higher levels of the model still can be used to do the same job as bridges just as effectively most of the time, such solutions may cost more and might be a slower but should work :)
 
A repeater will cut your speeds in half litterally, so If you want good speeds I reccomend a Ethernet bridge hooked to your own wireless router. That way you get good speeds and you can hook more than one device up wirelessly and wired via Ethernet.

Oh alright, thanks. Useful to know. So if we bought another WRT320, or even a WRT400 so we get the 2.4 and 5 frequencies for the XBox 360, we could have them connect to each other using the second router as a bridge? That would definitely give us wonderful coverage and a good setup for file sharing, right?
 
Oh alright, thanks. Useful to know. So if we bought another WRT320, or even a WRT400 so we get the 2.4 and 5 frequencies for the XBox 360, we could have them connect to each other using the second router as a bridge? That would definitely give us wonderful coverage and a good setup for file sharing, right?

Yes purchase a decent quality Ethernet bridge and hook it to whatever model router you desire (you said you need 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz so I would go with whichever model you mentioned is dualband) and hook it to the Ethernet bridge and you should be good. The bridge should obviously be in range of the network your trying to bridge up to. With a network like this you can obviously access music and files from your familys network so that's a huge plus.
 
Yes purchase a decent quality Ethernet bridge and hook it to whatever model router you desire (you said you need 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz so I would go with whichever model you mentioned is dualband) and hook it to the Ethernet bridge and you should be good. The bridge should obviously be in range of the network your trying to bridge up to. With a network like this you can obviously access music and files from your familys network so that's a huge plus.

Awesome, thanks! Great help.
 
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