WiFi Range Extender loses connection and affects the main router

Question

I bought a Tenda AH302 Wireless Range Extender and sent it to my girlfriend overseas. The reason for its addition to the network is that the router is on the living room and somehow its signal doesn't reach her room. I helped her remotely in setting it up as a range extender wirelessly (same SSID as the main router and didn't use the ethernet cable) and it worked all right for the first day.

But then the range extender's connection dropped and dragged the router's connection down, too. Even after turning the range extender off, devices still wouldn't connect to the router. The only solution is to restart the router and it worked again -- even the range extender.

Then this happened again so we had to stop using the range extender. They never had this issue since.

We're really hesitant on putting the range extender back into the loop. But why do you think this is happening? And how do you think we could resolve this? Thank you.

Answer 1

Wireless extenders work fine, I built my own with openwrt and have had no problems. Wireless extenders are only acting as a bridge to your real connection, they don't really extend, they will connect to your wifi and create a new wifi with the same name and channel. If the wifi extender is failing that could mean its connection to the main wifi is out of its reach, so place it in a acceptable distance to the main router.

Other thing you could check is to scan for nearby neighbors wifis than are interfering with the signal of the new wifi extender. Find a free channel and use it. Using 5Ghz signal will improve A LOT your experience.

Answer 2

On my personal experience avoiding extenders are the best practice. The best solution here is move the router to a better position on the house, and that will be in the middle of the house.

Wifi antennas usally are omnidirectional, they draw a circle and with normal potency (allowed by law), this will draw a circle from 10 to 15m radius.

Also try placing the router/antenna's 30cm far from any obstacule, incluiding walls, on an elevate position.

All I just said on my personal experience it's the best practice, no extenders, no WDS router repeaters. Only placing more antennas will really help, but consumer routers don't allow this.