Brief Inquiry Regarding Most Efficient New Home Network Setup

[EnSabahNur]

Hello LTT Community, 

 

I recently have moved into a new place and have some pretty decent home networking hardware at my disposal to setup my new network. The unfortunate part about it is my new place is in a rural area with abysmal DSL net speeds (ping: 14ms / Download speed: 5.25mbps / upload speed: 0.36mbps) due to having no other options but throttled low monthly data cap satellite.

 

The hardware I have on hand is:

 > 1. ASUS RT-AC3200 Tri band router 

>  1. netgear nighthawt AC1900 router

 

My house is about 100-150 feet in length (all 1 story) and I need to have the strongest possible wireless connection on both ends of the house in a straight line. My idea was to setup my ASUS3200 on one end of the house normally (all devices that need to be hardwired Ethernet lines are only in this room), and setup my Nighthawk1900 as just an access point at the other end of the house to strengthen the signal. I have tried to setup the ASUS 3200 alone to provide good wireless signal to the other end of the house, and it does extend far enough, but the signal strength often drops and reduces the wireless speed significantly due to the distance/interference. Moreover I have a 2 perfect condition netgear nhawk routers lying around so I figure this would be a more productive way to get use out of them, as apposed to using them as paper weights.   

 

The best way I know of doing this setup most efficiently is through the use of a Powerline adapter which I would place in the room with the main ASUS router, and then in the room with the Nhawk router setup as an access point. To my knowledge, this is the best way to go about solving the weak signal strength at the other end of the house that only uses tablets and phones.  

 

So in short, my direct questions are:

 

- Is this the best possible setup I can do given the circumstances outlined above?

 

- Through the little knowledge I have about networking, I've read consistently that wireless repeaters and range extenders are NOT the way to go as they immediately reduce signal efficacy by 50%, were as by setting up a spare router as a wireless access point. you don't get any of these drawbacks. Am I correct in this assumption?

 

- Since I assume that I will most likely be requiring a power line adapter, what is the very best quality/performance based power line adapter available today? (money is not an issue)

 

- I recently saw a review on a Ubiquity enterprise wifi system. Would just purchasing a Ubiquity access wifi system just be much better than using a second router as the access point on the other end of my house?

 

So yes, this is my idea and I'm more than open to learn from the incredible knowledge base here at Linus Tech Tips. Please provide any of your best suggestions or feedback on a better setup or hardware available that I would benefit from; even if I haven't covered it in my initial post. Thank you so much in advance for all the help, and please remember, wireless performance and range is really REALLY important for my network; so anything that can be done to help will be much appreciated.   

[brwainer]

Your idea is good, but another possible way is to use the nighthawk at the DSL modem, and the AC3200 router as an AP in the middle or other end of the house. And yes, powerline is the way to go if you can't run ethernet. With your hardware, I would get at least a 600Mb kit, if not a 1200Mb kit. It won't make your internet any faster, but they at least if you have a server in the future you wouldn't have the powerline as the bottleneck (or it will be less of a bottleneck, depending on the condition/quality of your actual power lines)