08-28-2010, 08:45 PM

Hi all. I have a 3 year old Linksys Wireless Router connected to my modem which is connected to my G5 tower (which is about seven years old). All of these things are in the same room. The problem is no other computer in the house can make a connection to the internet beyond about 15 feet. So basically just the two rooms connected to my bedroom are net accessible. There's three more rooms in the house but the connection can't reach that distance. The solution would be me drilling a hole in the floor of the central room, running a long ethernet cord under the house from the router to the modem in my room and that way hopefully all of the rooms in my smallish house would be net accessible.

So my question is, is their a router on the market that has more distance strength? One that is guaranteed to cover my entire house? Or better yet, is there a router that doesn't need a cord to the modem (which would save me drilling hole in my floor and crawling under the house with a ethernet cord)? Are they now making routers that eliminated these distance problems?

Oh, and my girlfriend's computer that's trying to connect is a fairly old Mac laptop.

Much, much thanks in advance. Appreciated.

Les

08-28-2010, 09:09 PM

What is the model of the Linksys? That really sounds like bad range. I have a small house and any of my Linksys routers are pretty much full signal on any Mac or PC Laptop anywhere in my house and outside in the front yard.

08-30-2010, 01:30 AM

OK, it appears I have a rather cheap router here. What I have is a TrendNet 54Mbps Wireless G Broadband Router as seen here:

TRENDnet | Products | Wireless G Routers | TEW-432BRP

It says the cost is 43 bucks. I'm assuming that's not the most powerful router known to mankind, correct? I bought it a few years back assuming it would do the job. Apparently it's not a Linksys as I assumed.

So I guess my question is do the number of Mbps a router has affect its ability to reach? Is this router I have the cause of my problem? And if so, what type and brand of router do you recommend?

Thanks much, much, much for taking the time. Much appreciated.

08-30-2010, 09:59 AM

I have had good luck with the netgear extended range stuff - but since I went to Apple - I have been running a WDS with Airport Expresses and a Time Capsule. The Time Capsule itself covers my entire house - I actually bought the Expresses to use with Airtunes and as a bonus they increase coverage. I have a 3300 sf 3 story house.

I like the Airport Extreme or the Time Capsule as they are actually
1)A gigabit switch
2)A router
3)A usb to ethernet hub - for printers and hard drives
and in the case of a time capsule - a network attached storage.
For the price it is hard to beat - try looking for the prices of a usb to ethernet print server.

The only downside - and why I still run a netgear as my main router - is that it doesn't have dyndns built in. This is a pretty specific thing but you can put a script on any computer to take care of that as well.