I installed two of these extenders on my network an extensively tested them using WiFi Explorer (a great app for diagnosing your wireless network). The bottom line is they work pretty well but with a few critical caveats both in terms of speed capacity and setup.
On the plus side, I found these extenders to be pretty attractive -- they end up looking like those plug-in air fresheners, certainly less obtrusive than the newer RE210 version with the external antennas. And for the record the only different between these and the newer RE210's (other than appearance) is the 210's have a gigabit Ethernet port where these have a 100mbps Ethernet port. So unless you plan to use the wired port, save money on these.
Setup was also easy if you have a newer wifi router that has a WPS button. You just plug one of these into a wall outlet near the main router, hit the WPS button on the main router, hit the WPS button on the RE200 and wait a few minutes until all the lights are solid green. Then unplug it, move it where you want to permanently station it as an extender and wait a minute and you should be good to go. By default it duplicates the main routers network name (SSID) and your various devices should "roam" to the strongest signal as necessary.
Here are the caveats:
1) The easy WPS setup did not properly setup the 5.0GHz band of my router, only the 2.4GHz. Most wifi routers out now are "dual-band" -- they send separate signals out over both the 2.4GHz band and the 5.0GHz band. The 5.0 is much faster but typically has a shorter range. 2.4 is for older devices or greater distances, but also is more likely to experience interference from a host of other devices that use a similar band, from cordless phones to microwaves. Apple's routers disguise these two bands as one network name (which has both pros and cons) but most routers establish two network names, one for each band.
When the WPS setup was done, the RE210 claimed, via its light, to be broadcasting on both the 2.4 and 5.0 bands. But my first clue something wasn't right was that they only duplicated the 2.4 band network name. The WiFi Explorer showed they were broadcasting separately on both bands, but with only the 2.4 name. However, the Explorer also showed they were only bridging/connecting to the main router via the 2.4 band. So what was happening, but it's default setup, is the extenders were receiving signals from both 2.4 and 5.0 devices but down-converting any 5.0 devices to 2.4 when bridging to the main router. Which would result in much slower speeds that you should see for a 5.0 device. This is one of the reasons (but not the only one) that some people complain this slows down their network.
I was able to fix this by customizing the setup of the RE210's manually. I used an Ethernet cable attached to my laptop and the Ethernet port of each RE210 (one at a time). Then I opened a browser page to www.tplinkrepeater.net. It asked for a username and password. The default answers for both unless you change them are "admin". From there it was relatively straight forward to see that the connection to the main router's 5.0 band was "disconnected" and to follow the steps to connect it.
2) So now I had properly functioning dual-band extenders. But my performance was still far slower than when I was directly-connected to the main router on 5.0. This is because of two reasons. First, the maximum throughout speed capacity of the extenders is only about 1/3 that of my main router. They both use 5.0GHz and "ac" (the latest wifi standard), but the extenders have a lesser capacity. Second, Apple devices (which I primarily use) do a lousy job of "roaming." Roaming is when the device automatically switches from one device broadcasting the same network to another to get a better signal. It's the same way your mobile devices work from cell tower to tower. That's how the network extenders work too (by default*). But using WiFi Explorer I have been able to see that my Apple laptop gets very loyal to an extender even when the signal and speed are far worse than the main router. Windows and Android devices allow pretty discrete user control over how aggressively a device "roams" but Apple likes to keep it simple and not allow a lot of user control so they don't.
There is a way around this problem, with a trade-off. You can have the extenders broadcast their own discrete network names (SSID's). If you do this your devices will not automatically roam, you would have to manually device when you are getting a weak signal from the wifi device you are currently connected to tell it to switch to the other one. But this way you could be in full control of staying on the main router as much as possible and only switching in your known deadspots, especially if you give the extenders logical names (for example, if your main router was called "Joe WiFi" you could name your extender networks "Joe WiFi Upstairs" and "Joe WiFi Basement" etc.).
The other alternative, which I am seriously considering but haven't tried yet, is the undo all the configuring I described above and intentionally having the extenders only work on the 2.4 network. That way the 2.4 network would roam, but the 5.0 would stick with the main router. If I hit a truly deadspot I would manually switch over to the 2.4 network with the extenders. I have an ancillary motive in this plan, because most of the extenders are for deadspots my kids use -- their rooms, family room, etc. So doing this would have the secondary benefit of keeping the faster 5.0 network as uncongested as possible. Your needs may be different. A hybrid is also possible, I think, where you could roam on 2.4 but have the extenders use a unique network name for the 5.0 band.
| Wireless Type | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac |
|---|
