Advice: buying multiple airport extremes?

We have a brick house that is about 150 years old. It's 3-brick thick, we have lots of old plaster walls, 2 basements(one finished, one old).

The point is, I've tried putting our single-router setup in every room possible and it can never work for our whole house. I've also used multiple routers from Linksys. Secondly, I put one router in my basement(one side of the house) and another in the upstairs of the opposite side of the house using it as an access point and I am always getting terrible connection issues.


I was thinking about buying 3-4 Airport Extremes and putting them in major parts of our home. I own about 3,000 feet of cat-6, so I planned on wiring 3-4 hardwire ports in the major rooms and running them to my basement to the 5th airport extreme which is connected to the router. Here's how it would be setup:




Basically the other 4 Airport Extremes would be in corners of the house, so they can reach our outside patios/porches as well (hopefully).

I thought about Airport Express but I don't want to just boost the signal because we do a LOT of streaming throughout our house(tons of airplay and apple tv) and I need the best signal I can possibly have.





Let me know what you guys think.

Very nice idea, but any particular reason to use Airport Extreme's? Not exactly the cheapest option. I'm not saying cheap is good of course, what I mean is using D-Link's or similar would be cheaper and just as good, especially as you are hardwiring them to your main hub.

I've tried about every Linksys possible, a few Netgears and at least 1 or 2 D-link routers and all of them that I've used(even with researching them first) just were very sub-par. I've never used an Apple product so far in my life that was less than amazing.

They would be hardwired to the main dhcp router, but they would still be giving off wifi to those areas of the house/porches.


Also, when we get rid of our whole-house audio for Airplay speakers, this will really help out!

If you are truly worried about streaming then your plan is probably the best. You can keep the dual band segregated on every device so that every N device is on a 5GHz band and all the G devices are on the 2.4 band. Downside is with 5GHz you'll have less penetration. Anyway - it is expensive but it should cover your house pretty well. If you can hardwire cat 6 it is the way to go. Another way is to use powerline products like netgear has. It won't be as fast as the gigabit but it may be easier as far as wiring goes.

The down side is there is no airplay out for the Extreme - where the Expresses have Airplay audio out. Although if you want full Airplay - it would be better to get ATVs and put them around the house - vs multiple Airports (assuming your speaker systems have digital inputs)

I'm glad someone has a pile of money in this economy.

Well right now we have this Nuvo whole-house audio setup: (NuVo Essentia 6-Source, 6-zone Audio Distribution System, Amp Only - NV-E6GM-DC - Smarthome)

with 6 zones (master bedroom, sun room, kitchen/laundry room, porch, patio, garage)

and I'd like to, in some way, get rid of that audio system and replace those zones with airplay. I'm still figuring out a way to make that happen.