I need some home networking advice
 

I have Qwest DSL at home with their wifi router. My late 40's house is L shaped and the phone drop and equipment is in the extreme northwest corner of the home. The signal gets weaker the further away you get and it is virtually non existent in the other corner of the home and basement. I've got a signal extender in the southwest corner of the L but it seems to cause more issues sometimes.

Should I run ethernet cable and set up an access point in the attic or in a few other areas of the home? Any recommendations on equipment and the easiest way to do this would be appreciated.

the basement could help tremendously. Having access to the attic is good too. I've had great luck with wireless products from Ubiquiti, available online. Their software is easy to navigate, and I've found their hardware far more reliable than the gear you buy in the box stores. Nothing has needed rebooting, as I often had to do with netgear, linksys, dlink and others.

One cool thing, most of their products support PoE, so if attached to a PoE switch, you would simply need an ethernet cable to each device.

These can run in wireless repeater mode, but I suggest instead using them as a wireless access point with an ethernet cable attached.

I recently upgraded my home network.

My wife wanted all equipment hidden, so I had the modem/router installed in my media closet in the basement. The signal was fine in the front half of the house, both downstairs and upstairs, but in the guest bedroom and master bedroom, it was virtually unusable. I tried a signal extender, and while that made it better, the service was still slow, and I usually had to manually switch to the correct network when I moved around the house.

A number of companies have popped up recently with easy to use mesh networks. Google just unveiled there version a couple of weeks ago. I went with the eero wifi system with 2 routers. The difference was night and day. Basement speed went from 45mbps to 85mpbs and the master bedroom went from 5mbps to 60mbps. Best part is that it took maybe 5 mins to setup. There are cheaper ways to achieve the same results, but none as as easy as this. There are other options as well.

https://eero.com/

Ethernet and access point is the way to go.

Simplest and most reliable / robust.

Something that people forget about unwired repeaters, they can only extend the signal strength they receive.

Draw an imaginary circle around the main wifi.

Center represents the strongest signal and the edge represents the weakest / no signal.

Now draw a circle around the repeater.

How far that circle penetrates the 1st signal represents the best / strongest signal the repeater will give you.

If you go that route you should only use a dual band.

A repeater needs to run on the same channel as the primary wifi. It also has to deal with backhaul over wifi (backhaul over ethernet is preferred) and both radios are also broadcasting to clients over the same channel.

That creates a **** ton of interference and degrades performance.

With dual channel you can extend on one frequency and serve clients on the other eliminating some of the noise.

EDIT: If buying new hardware buy dual channel AC units even if you run ethernet. That will allow you to limit slower wifi devices to one frequency reserving the other for your faster stuff. Remember, wifi operates at the speed of the slowest connected device.

First...
I have a base router in the middle of my house and wireless bridged or extended wifi routers in each of my bedrooms each at ends of the house. The computer I use sits right next to the wirelsss bridged wifi router in that room. I can turn off the room router and the wireless network speed of that computer drops to half. It is about 40 ft from the base and line of site. The wireless network is dual channel AC.

Other experiences..

Wired bridged wifi extension.
Set up my nephews new home. The new construction had all metal framing, it was like each room was a faraday cage. Used Apple Airport base stations at the time because they were easiest to setup and manage. Used a central base station with it's wired ports and wifi on the same network. The used other basestations wired to the central base station and their wifi extending the same wifi. With the wired connection to the base each access point was full bandwidth. Had the base and 3 remote hubs to cover his two story house. The base and one remote upstairs and two remotes downstairs. Basically one covering each of the 4 corners. Had to use wired wireless extenders because they could not reliably connect to the base.

Wireless bridged wifi extension.
My current house is not that big and my media center where the internet and wifi routers are is centrally located. When I first set up my wifi I could get 3 houses away no problem. Now there are so many with wifi in my neighborhood you can't go to one end or the other of the house without major signal loss and speed drops significantly, and my house is NOT that big!

My base was an Apple Time Capsule. Got a new Airport Extreme Base and two Airport Express's. Use the new Extreme for the base put the time capsule in a bedroom at one end of the house and an Airport express in each of the two bedrooms on the other end of the house. Set them up in wireless bridged mode. Now I have fast wireless all over the house again.

My main computer is right next to one of the bridged express routers. The express router is not wired. Can turn the router off and the computer's wireless speed drops to half. Same with the other two bedrooms.

More wireless extension.
A few years after I moved into my house my brother's father-in-law moved into a house right behind mine. A board member of the company we work for moved in next door to him, also directly behind my house. My brother moved into a house across the street from them. To save money we tried to have all four houses on the same wireless network and share the same internet connection.

The problem was the alley between my back yard and theirs has both underground cables and above ground cables. No matter what we did we could not get the network to pass the wireless wall it created. Where I work we have offices two blocks from each other that are connected wirelessly. Even the professional company that set that up was not able to get the signal to pass he wall. It's interesting a can walk around in my back yard and only see the networks on my side of the property line. Can go thru the gate to the back yards of the houses behind me and all the networks on my side disappear and I can only see the networks on that side of the property Line.

We ended up with two networks one for that side of the wall, and mine.

When I was working on setting up the big network thing I told the neighbors on either side of me what I was doing and that I could srt them up on the same network. That for the comparatively low one time cost of a wireless bridge router in each of there attics they would have fast wireless internet and no bill. They said no. Just don't understand people.

I thought I'd update this thread with what I ended up doing. This post sent me on a search for something simple that I could do myself.

I ended up buying Google's new wifi system. I had to wait two weeks for them to ship from Amazon. I set it up last night in 20 minutes.

My house is an L shape, the DSL comes into the northwest corner of the house. Speeds before install with the built in wifi from the router were 37 Mbps in that room, 26 in the adjacent kitchen, 13 in the master bedroom in the southeast corner and no signal in the office which is toward the southwest corner. After install of 3 units (living room, master and office) were 42 Mbps in the living room, 42 in the kitchen, 31 in the master and 30 in the office. The rear bedroom which had no signal is now at 19 and the basement which had intermittent connectivity was a solid 21. It sits below the office. I went out to my metal pole building and in corner closest to the house, it was mid teens. At the rear corner, I was still able to connect but it was down to below 1Mbps. I may buy one more unit for that space.

Setup was easy, app is very intuitive. They are running $100 less than the 3 pack from eero. So far very pleased.

Thanks for the update. Sounds like a decent system.

Sounds good.

I solved the same issue with three cheap 801.11ac routers bridged to AP's and wired to central router. Speed tops around 240Mbit (if near the AP's, using 5GHZ and 801.11ac) and coverage is always good.

It cost roughly 150$...

My set up is the same.

3 AC routers, 2 ASUS and one the cable provider supplied primary router.

Get a solid 300 mbps minimum throughout 2 floors and just shy of 5k sq ft.

One quick question.

I am still limited to sat internet which is slow: Is there any advantage to upgrading the in home equipment? Seems wasteful to me.

Depends.

How much do you transfer between computers inside the house?

Do you stream movies from iTunes or similar?

If no then no.

Very little.

All downloads are scheduled off hours.

The sat internet deal blows but it is all I can get right now. I've tried. Every new deal I read about here or other sources walks me thought the, "Is our service available in your area?" It never is.

I checked into my hotel an hour ago and since I get free premium internet, downloaded all the upgrades waiting in the App Store.

I lead a sad internet existence:)

Mine is the same...

You might look into a Cellular connection in your area. Not sure what equipment/towers are nearby, but I am regularly getting speeds over 20Mbps on my cellular phone and cell connected tablet, on T-Mobile. When I was in Orlando, I was getting 50-75Mbps down and 20-30Mbps up!