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Linking a Netgear EX6100 range extender to a 2nd Netgear EX6100 range extender
A friend has a Linksys N750 ADSL router in one room. A Netgear EX6100 is connected to it via wi-fi as a range extender. However the home is large and wi-fi does not cover the entire home with the range extender in place. So my friend wants to connect a 2nd Netgear EX6100 range extender to the 1st one.
How do I go about getting this done?
Regards
Dennis
In principle, you would set up the 2nd EX6100 to connect to the 1st EX6100's Wi-Fi network. But this is generally not recommended.
Performance will be severely degraded. An extender, when operating completely wirelessly, imposes at least a 50% drop in speed for clients connected to it. This is due to the fact that the extender must use its Wi-Fi radio to shuffle traffic back and forth between clients and the router. If a second extender is connected to the first, then clients connected to the 2nd extender will experience a speed drop of 75%. That will usually be unacceptable.
A common practice of setting up an extender to broadcast the same Wi-Fi SSID as the main router will not be possible. The 1st extender could inadvertently connect to the 2nd extender instead of the router. This would create a loop and render the extenders ineffective. Each extender will need to broadcast its own unique SSID. Extenders are, by default, set up to do this, so there's nothing that you explicitly have to do to avoid this looping problem. But it does mean that devices will have be programmed with the 3 SSIDs: the router's and the 2 extender's.
All of these problems can be avoided by connecting the extenders to the router via Ethernet or, less preferably, Powerline. If it's not convenient to connect all of them together, then next best is to wire the two extenders to each other. If wiring is simply not an option, then try to arrange things so that each extender connects directly to the router while still providing the desired coverage.
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In principle, you would set up the 2nd EX6100 to connect to the 1st EX6100's Wi-Fi network. But this is generally not recommended.
Performance will be severely degraded. An extender, when operating completely wirelessly, imposes at least a 50% drop in speed for clients connected to it. This is due to the fact that the extender must use its Wi-Fi radio to shuffle traffic back and forth between clients and the router. If a second extender is connected to the first, then clients connected to the 2nd extender will experience a speed drop of 75%. That will usually be unacceptable.
A common practice of setting up an extender to broadcast the same Wi-Fi SSID as the main router will not be possible. The 1st extender could inadvertently connect to the 2nd extender instead of the router. This would create a loop and render the extenders ineffective. Each extender will need to broadcast its own unique SSID. Extenders are, by default, set up to do this, so there's nothing that you explicitly have to do to avoid this looping problem. But it does mean that devices will have be programmed with the 3 SSIDs: the router's and the 2 extender's.
All of these problems can be avoided by connecting the extenders to the router via Ethernet or, less preferably, Powerline. If it's not convenient to connect all of them together, then next best is to wire the two extenders to each other. If wiring is simply not an option, then try to arrange things so that each extender connects directly to the router while still providing the desired coverage.