NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Inconsistent Wireless Connection
This is for a small business but I am using a home product. I have a Netgear N600 Dual Band Gig Router paired with 9 EX6100 Range Extenders. I originally had 4 and just added 5 more to help blanket the building we are in. Since adding the additional 5, the consistency of the wireless is very poor. When a few people are running on it, it works fine and no problems. When we have a large number of guests in our building who try to access it, the service flakes out and I am spending the entire time they are here trying to get the system up and running. The wirless has a passcode on it and most of the time I get errors like can't obtain IP address or Authentication error even though I have been signed into the same Wireless for weeks without a problem.
Is there a way to troubleshoot this or find out what is going on? All units are up to date on firmware and are all tied to the same network so a person can walk around the building and never lose connection.
Thanks.
Jayson
5 Replies
Hello BigJay2100
Its not recommended to have all the extenders named the same SSID as it can cause conflicts since these are not designed to hand off the users devices to the closest extender. The person stays connected to just 1 extender until it loses complete connection then it will try to connect to a new one. Also are you daisy chaining the extenders or is each extender connected to the main router? If you are going extender to extender then your cutting your speed in half every time which would cause really slow speeds on the extenders that are far out. But if you connect every extender to the main router you are only cutting the speed in half once.
DarrenM
Yes all my extenders are named the same SSID but I thought that was the purpose of extenders, to extend your network. That is the entire reason for these to be built and implemented.
The extenders are connected to the primary network. How they connect, not entirely sure. I know when I set them up, I searched for the network name and connected them to that. In most places, the extender can't hit the main router due to the distance from it or the materials in the building that block the signal.
As I think about this some more and the response I have recieved, let me expand on this a bit more.
I guess I can understand the reasoning behind needing different SSID's but if that was the case, Netgear should not tell you in the instructions to make sure the SSID is the same as the primary network so the system can do that handoff between routers.
I do understand there may be a loss of signal as you move between extenders and you lose the connection to one and connect to the next but that really is no differnet than cell towers as you move between one and another. You don't lose your call when you make that handoff(well sometimes you do but the technology is built so you don't).
In most cases I have, the device connected is stationary and not moving so it should always be connected to the same extender unless that extender goes down or drops its connection and then the device will need to look for the next closest one. I believe I have my extenders positioned around the office in a way that there is a very strong signal all over the place no matter where you are. The only reason for an extender to drop connection is if the entire system goes down, power is lost or the extender fails. In all cases, when I see the loss of connect, the extenders show all green lights.
Example today. I have two laptops that are sitting in a room. In the location they are in, there are two extenders in range. One is about 10 feet from where the laptops are and the other is about 25 feet away. All of a sudden, the connection went to limited connection. All the lights were green and good but there was no connect. I had to disconnect and reconnect each laptop to get back on. This happened about 5 times before I just connected one of the laptops to my hard line.
