WiFi extender that supports 802.1x authentication?
I’m an intern at a church that is currently meeting at a middle school. We livestream our 9AM services, and our preferred way of doing so would be to use our video switcher, a piece of hardware that switches between multiple video inputs, and has a built in encoder for streaming; however, this device has no facility for connecting to WiFi, it must have a wired CAT5/6 connection to a device on the net. At our last venue, we used a WiFi router, but at this school we can’t get a steady enough signal to stream reliably. There are Ethernet ports at the school, but I believe you need to go through some kind of authentication before you can join the network, and our video switcher has no facility for doing any kind of authentication handshake. Then it occurred to us that a WiFi extender might solve our problems; if we could get a WiFi extender to connect to the school’s WiFi (which is definitely fast enough for us to use for uploading video content, something like 140 Mbps up), and if that WiFi extender had an Ethernet port on it that would allow a wired connection to the WiFi network, that should theoretically work. The problem we’re running into is that the school’s WiFi seems to implement 802.1x as its authentication protocol (at least, that’s listed as the connection type in iOS), and the WiFi extender we purchased doesn’t appear to support that protocol, in fact I’m not finding any WiFi extenders in my online queries that do. Does NETGEAR make a WiFi extender that will extend an 802.1x network? Or is there a better way of solving this problem that we haven’t thought of?
Re: WiFi extender that supports 802.1x authentication?
If the router you're using to connect currently, doesn't get a good enough signal, why do you think an extender will? it has the same connection limitations.
If the room has a hardwired connection, you can just connect the router to that and then the device to the router. And if there's issues, contact the schools IT person as it might be something the IT person has to allow on their end.
