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Forum Discussion
Two Nighthawk AX5400 (RAX50) routers in one house? U-Verse related!
Our house is in the shape of a capital "L". Our U-Verse BGW210 is located at the small end of the "L". Our bedroom & office are located at the big end of the "L". As a result, our wi-fi reception is spotty throughout the house, and especially at the big end of the "L".
So I am going to set up my new Nighthawk AX5400 (RAX50) router to the BGW210 at the small end of the "L". The AX5400 has a reach of 2500 square feet but to ensure maximum reach & wi-fi in our house, can I use a second AX5400 in a more central location of the house? Is this doable?
27 Replies
If you're needing 2x devices, might be better to check into a mesh system like orbi or the MK nighthawk
I'd check into the tribands as the dedicated backhaul helps quite a bit.
Not sure if you have the RAX50 already but for the price of 2x of them, the MK83 or RBK753 would be cheaper and have another satellite to help with coverage.
We currently have a Google Nest Wifi set up. The router is set up with the U-Verse BGW210, 1 point is located at the intersection of the "L", and 1 point is in the middle of the big part of the "L". Our internet service is 1000Mbps with us actually testing out at around 900 at the Google router. However, at the of the big part of the "L" we are sometimes seeing 20Mbps. This doesn't work with my wife's job as an online teacher.
So I guess my question is this: Would the Orbi perform better than the Google Nest?
what model google wifi is it?
The tribands have been pretty rock solid and allow daisy chaining.
It really helps with speeds for the situation like you're in where its L shaped
If you already have 2 RAX50s, then simply running an Ethernet cable to the locationyou want to place the RAX50, and putting the second one in AP mode and set to the same SSID and password as the main router/AP, and things should work pretty seamlessly.
The only downside is that the bottleneck will literally be the gigabit Ethernet connection to the main router. The 802.11ax 5GHz radio in the RAX50 can easily do 1.7 Gbps to 1.8+ Gbps in real world throughput between itself and multiple wired clients. But if communicating across the backhaul, everything will top out at 940Mbps since the RAX50 lacks a 2.5GbE port.Beyond that, roaming will largely be client directed with only some benefit from 802.11k, thus newer clients made in the last 8 or so years will roam pretty smoothly, but older clients will be more sticky where they will only roam when the signal is weak.
A mesh system like the Orbi devices have the full range of roaming assists, and will provide a faster and smoother experience, though a wireless backhaul will not perform as fast as a wired one unless you are using one of the higher end orbi devices, though most of the Orbi units can also use a wired backhaul if needed.
