Bridge Wifi w/ WNDR3700

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NotSoSimple

[H]F Junkie
Joined
May 17, 2003
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I have a Netgear WNDR3700 and it works great. However our house is pretty long and the 802.11n signal is pretty weak in the living room area. I also have all of my home theater equipment in a closet on the 'weak' side of the house. I can possibly run CAT5 but still need to extend the 802.11n signal. What option would be best in terms of bandwidth preservation? We will be moving to straight streaming so reliable and fast network speeds are important.

Option A) Wireless Bridge between the WNDR3700 and closet equipment
Option B) CAT5 to closet to a WAP and equipment

Trying to balance cost and performance.
 
uhm... have you SEEN your PMs?

oh, and do BOTH. But with Cat5e ;)
 
Anyone besides Warrior have insight?

Looking for a router or AP that would bridge best with my WNDR3700. Would a WNDR3400 work? Can I jump vendors?
 
Run a wire and get another wireless router to put on the end of that wire, hook up your a/v stuff to the wire as well. Repeaters, range extenders, etc... are rarely a good idea. They halve the bandwidth available through them. However, having another wireless router on the other side of the house will not allow seamless roaming as a repeater OR a business wifi network would offer (Ubiquity has a seamless wifi solution now for a few hundred bucks).

If you have your heart set on a bridge. An Asus rt-n16 (or rt-n12 if you want to save a little money) will be VERY stable running tomato usb (Yes, you can jump vendors). ALL atheros based routers currently run like crap, or not at all in bridge mode running open wrt or dd-wrt.
 
Thanks for the feedback. Thinking of just throwing a WNDR3400 on the network. I can get one really cheap.

So no seamless with consumer based gear? So I would have to associate manually each time depending on what end of the house I am in?
 
No seamless roaming with consumer gear. The wireless client WILL switch automatically to the access point on the other side of the house, but it is up to the client when that happens and it tears down and resets up the connection. You can set up aggressive roaming settings in most wireless adapter driver settings, so the switch happens sooner. However, it still won't be seamless. Seamless- the ability to transition from one wireless access point to another WITHOUT having the connection tear down every time the client transtions.
 
Well I dont mind a brief connect/disconnect. It will be better than dropping signal/packets like the conditions now.

Will I need to keep the SSIDs and channels the same between the two?
 
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