How do you use two wireless routers to expand the range of your wireless network?

Question

I have researched this quite a bit but the answers are somewhat elusive. No matter where I put the wireless router in our house, no matter which brand I buy, no matter how large the antennas are on the router, there are some places in the house that get very sporadic or low connections wirelessly. I have several mainstream wireless routers. Has anyone successfully enabled a connection between two routers to improve wireless reception? I also tried a range extender, and it worked, except that I ended up getting constant IP conflicts, plus the thing consistently lost its connection to the internet every night.

Answer 1

Some offer Routers that are WDS compliant, you can use them to extend your Network using one as the Main and set up to Distribute IP's while the other is set up as a remote and must be set to Not distribute IP's
There are only a select few on the market that support WDS and you will need to check.
I know for a fact that Apple's Airport Extreme Base and there Airport Express have the WDS function.
here is a link explaining how it works.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107454
Good Luck
Don

Answer 2

Yes and not usually. Yes, you can have any number of wireless routers in one network. This can increase range and it can also increase the total available wireless bandwidth. However, typically the wireless bandwidth is already greater than the Internet bandwidth, so it's unlikely to make Internet access any faster. There are two exceptions: 1) If the Internet access is faster than the wireless. This can happen if your Internet access is very fast and your WiFi is comparatively slower. For example, say you have 50Mbps FIOS and 54Mbps WiFi. But suppose one device is far away and is only getting 10Mbps. If that device is transferring 10Mbps, it will consume the entire channel, leaving no bandwidth available for other devices even though the Internet connection has plenty of speed to spare. An additional router could make available an additional 54Mbps channel. 2) If there is a lot of local traffic. This can happen if you have WiFi streaming media. For example, if you're streaming video at 20Mbps, have 50Mbps FIOS, and 54Mbps WiFi, the streaming video will only leave 34Mbps available for Internet access. An additional router could, again, make available an additional 54Mbps channel. However, in most realistic cases, it will only improve wireless range.

Answer 3

I haven't used 2 routers but with a range extender you should be fine, you just need to programme your base station to broadcast to a define IP address range then assign fixed IP addresses to your computers within that range. that should work fine.

Answer 4

i would have reccomended a range extender myself but with the problems you have been having with those i would reccomend powerline networking

this solution is not wireless and sends the web signals over you home power lines to the outlets so you can get internet wherever there is an electrical outlet.

powerline router and adapter
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122167

aditional adapters
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122063