How can you boost the wifi signal to increase wifi coverage in your home? The traditional answer would be to get a more powerful router which will have more range and higher wifi network coverage. But your home might have walls arrangements in such ways that there are dead zones that have poor or no wifi coverage.
I like to blog from different rooms, but encounter several spots where internet coverage is very poor. Even my mobile smartphone needs to keep switching between wifi and 4G inside my house, adding to higher mobile bills due to extra data usage. I upgraded to a 16 Mbps internet Airtel connection, got a better modem-router (Belkin N300), tried various placements of the router and other ways to boost wifi signals, but the poor wifi zones persisted in some areas of my house.
And then I found the best way to increase my wifi network coverage – buy a wifi range extender!
Wifi Range Extender
My new wifi range extender (Netgear WN3000RP) has ensured I can now get wifi coverage in every part of the house and even outside the house patio. What is does is it simply sources the wifi from the current wifi router and spreads it across its own coverage area, leading to almost doubling the coverage area.
Setup Wifi Extender
Setting up networking devices always seems a hassle. But this one requires no CD/manual cable connection to set up. Just plug it into the socket (saves desk space), turn it on and it will catch the current wifi networks.
I then connected to this new network _EXT and it opens a Netgear site mywifiext.com to configure the wifi extender. In a few clicks all done, without any CD, cables or messing with the original modem-router. Now next time you let your devices prefer this new wifi network instead of your original network when inside this coverage area.
Wifi speed lesser? Note the speed is lesser than your original router. I get about 6-7 Mbps from the wifi extender while my original router gives 12 MBps.
Wifi Range Extender Price
I bought it for about INR 3000 and was worth every single rupee. There are faster more expensive models also available, but this seems to be a good balance between price and coverage. There are many more brands to choose from and probably they would all work well for this purpose.
Publishing this post from outside my house through a wifi extender! What are your thoughts on this?