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question wifi router and repeater devices

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is it possible to buy a good router or wifi repeater on Aliexpress for a low price? I currently have a second TP-LINK TW-WR541G router outside my room to distribute wifi throughout the rest of the house but my father has a samsung galaxy A10 smartphone and is always complaining that the wifi is slow so I wanted to spend as little as possible to improve it
 
"Cheap" usually means poor performance, poor quality and a short operating life.
 
"Cheap" usually means poor performance, poor quality and a short operating life.
Not. The original (but used) Li-ion 18650 costs $ 0.5-2. New, "cheap", non-original, with a 3200 mAh fake costs $ 3-10 (olx / slando). Mostly used electronics are cheap and work great. Not aliexpress but amazon slando and etc.
 
Repeaters often make things worse rather than better and are generally a bad idea. The 2.4GHz band is overloaded to near uselessness in many places, so adding anything on that has no guarantees.

Find a dual-band access point, or a scrap dual band router that can be reconfigured as an access point. The 5GHz band has vastly more space and can still work well.
With the number of people changing services and getting new routers, old ones are often available for next to nothing.

Give the LAN side a static IP within the range of your existing router LAN, give the WiFi the same name, security settings and password, disable DHCP on the new one and link one of its LAN ports to the existing router via Ethernet. Do not use the WAN port.

Make sure the two routers are set to channels different channels out of 1, 6 & 11 - if they are both supposed to be 600Mbit then just 1 & 11 and even that cannot avoid interference.

Any WiFi devices should roam between the to WiFi APs, using whichever is best at any point.
 
My cable TV/internet provider gave me four "wifi booster pods" that are plugged into electricity receptacles all over the house. They use 5GHz to avoid interference.
 
"Oops. We ran into some problems. Please wait 2 seconds to perform this." Every time I post a reply. Sometimes for a double post that does not show me the first post.
 
How do you know it is a problem with the WR541G, you don't say what your ISP connection is or what speed it is supposed to be running at. Have you tested the speed at both the ISP modem and one of the LAN ports on the WR541G to absolve it. Have you scanned the channels it is working on to check for collisions, have you speed checked the WIFI using the same application you use to check the ISP speed ? All these questions and more you should know the answer to before seeking to change any hardware.
 
is it possible to buy a good router or wifi repeater on Aliexpress for a low price? I currently have a second TP-LINK TW-WR541G router outside my room to distribute wifi throughout the rest of the house but my father has a samsung galaxy A10 smartphone and is always complaining that the wifi is slow so I wanted to spend as little as possible to improve it

When checking the smartphone wifi speed, be sure to turn off the cell network on the smartphone. Otherwise, the smartphone may use the cellular network, (4G LTE) which is much slower, instead of using the smartphone's wifi network( Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n ) capability.
 
common issue with repeater is its too far from the router, the repeater should have good signal strength, and the devices weaker strength,

Also an even less known fact is that if one wifi device is lagging it will cause the others to lag, check other devices for good strength too.
 
The 2.4GHz band is overloaded to near uselessness in many places, so adding anything on that has no guarantees.
I live in an apartment block and the 2.4G band is basically useless. There's an Android App that shows current usage - called Wifi Analyser. This is what it shows in my apartment.
Screenshot_2021-06-17-11-35-54.png

My guess is that the WiFi networks around me are constantly swapping bands in an attempt to find an empty one. From memory, there are only about 14 bands available!!!

Mike.
 
My guess is that the WiFi networks around me are constantly swapping bands in an attempt to find an empty one. From memory, there are only about 14 bands available!!!
There are either 11 or 13 numbered channels, depending on what country you are in. However, the channel numbers were set before any of the WiFi standards now in use exist.

Present systems using the 2.4GHz band each take a frequency range of either four or eight of the old channels.

When 11g was the fastest system a few years back, careful arrangement could allow three or four systems to coexist using channels 1 - 6 - 11 or 1 - 5 - 9 - 13.

Newer, faster systems often take a block of eight or nine channels. There is no coexistence, only interference and "hidden station" effects.


And that's not counting all the other non-WiFi stuff that uses the same 2.4GHz band, anything from bluetooth to model radio control to video senders, wireless CCTV and video baby monitors etc., that do not register on WiFi receivers but still "jam" other signals.


For me, any place selling fixed devices such as PCs & smart TVs and saying they are suitable for WiFi ought to prosecuted.

And promoting WiFi for home automation devices etc. should be a crime.
There are other dedicated bands and systems for automation such as Z-Wave & Zigbee etc. that have no impact on WiFi and are not affected by interference from other WiFi systems.
>/rant<

(And yes, all my fixed ethernet gear and security is hard wired and automation is either wired or Z-Wave. I do practice what I preach).
 
I live in an apartment block and the 2.4G band is basically useless. There's an Android App that shows current usage - called Wifi Analyser. This is what it shows in my apartment.
View attachment 131965
My guess is that the WiFi networks around me are constantly swapping bands in an attempt to find an empty one. From memory, there are only about 14 bands available!!!

Nothing confusing about that graph at all :D
 
I live in an apartment block and the 2.4G band is basically useless. There's an Android App that shows current usage - called Wifi Analyser. This is what it shows in my apartment.
View attachment 131965
My guess is that the WiFi networks around me are constantly swapping bands in an attempt to find an empty one. From memory, there are only about 14 bands available!!!

Mike.
looks like a lot of devices are limiting themselves to very narrow bandwidths too if you look at the bottom third of the graph...
 
Anything with signal strength below -75 db is practically unusable.
That's most of the signals in the graph...:hilarious:
 
looks like a lot of devices are limiting themselves to very narrow bandwidths too if you look at the bottom third of the graph...
Look at the mode buttons below - I think that is a time plot of signals seen; spectrum would be the first menu button on the left.
 
When I first got a router and WiFi, mine was the only detectable WiFi signal on the street :D Rather different now, even though it's a quiet street. As others have said, use 5GHz if you can, more bandwidth, more speed, more channels, but shorter range.
 
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