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Forum Discussion
ORBI topology?
I have a 4500 SF two story home - ground floor is about 3,000 SF with the balance on the 2nd story. I have a 3000 SF shop (metal building) that is approximately 100' from the house (line-of-site). ...
I'm not riding the "mesh' marketing wave! I have an existing wireless network in the house that I'm generally happy with (it includes ONE wireless extender to get to to portions of the house not covered by the router).
My goal is to get WiFi in my shop. I've been lead to believe replacing my existing nework with MESH technology MIGHT be a cost effective way to get WiFi in the shop. After doing some research, it doesn't look like that is the case.
From what I can tell, I will need to 'bridge' the distance between the house and the shop with a hard wired (copper or fiber via digging and burrying conduit) or a soft bridge (point-to-point wireless). Once the 'bridge' is in place, I'm wondering why another 'extender' on the existing network wouldn't provide wireless access in the shop when hard wired to the 'bridge'?
Once the 'bridge' is in place would MESH technology provide ANY benefit over adding an extender to the existing nework?
From all I can tell, it looks like I need to add the wireless bridge (outside the shop) and hard wire a range extender (inside the shop) for WiFi coverage.
BRS918, you are correct that MESH will not help your garage coverage unless the garage itself needs a mesh to cover the size of it. Once you extend your house network 100 feet to the garage using either buried cable or a point-to-point link, then you can either add an access point (AP) using anouther router in AP mode, or an extender. The disadvantage of the extender is that they essentially repeat the signal from one SSID (i.e. MyWiFi) to another SSID (i.e. MyWiFi_ext) and cut the total throughput bandwidth in half doing so. Whereas another router in AP mode would be able to use your same SSID for the garage.
Using mesh with another satellite in the garage however could also provide you coverage between the two buildings. That way as you "roam" from the house to the garage with a smartphone, tablet or laptop, the WiFi coverage could be maintained between the two buildings as well.
Simple diagram:
House Satellite <-> cable to garage <-> Garage Satellite