Parents asked me for some help with home wireless; need some advice

Parents have asked me to help them with their wifi situation.

Here is their setup:

Router: ReadyNet WRT500

POE Injector: Tycon Systems TP-POE-24iR-Ci

The house has only one ethernet connection that is wired from the wall. This makes it so the router has to be placed on the far side of the middle story of the house (three story home). Not a terribly ideal spot, but not terribly bad either. If I plug a cable from the router directly into my GP73, I'm getting about 15 Mbps. If I am on the wifi and in the room next to the router, I get 12ish Mbps. If I go to the far corner of the basement, I'm getting about 3-6 Mbps.

Here's the kicker. If I make everyone get off the network but me, I can get 8-10 Mbps in the corner of the basement.

So I believe the issue is two-fold. One, there is not enough bandwidth for the amount of devices they need to be connected at once. Which is 8-10 devices at once in the evenings when everyone is watching Netflix and whatnot.

Second, the broadcast strength is not enough to get a solid signal in the corners of the house.

So I need to know what the remedy is?

 

If I do need a better router, I have heard this one is pretty much the best consumer grade router to get without getting into the "stupid amount of money spent" level. Thoughts?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0192911R...olid=2TSG40HKKUY2I&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

 

Any possibility to run ethernet between floors? That would solve a lot issues at once, you could then install something like mesh wifi with ethernet backhaul. With some luck there could be a pipe or hole between floors that you could use.

I'm thinking the easy to setup things, so also a mesh wifi but for the middle floor you'd need to draw ethernet near the stairway and install one ap there and the rest near it up and down. Signal goes thru the open stairway better than floors and walls obviously. So hopefully every floor's access point would be strong enough for it's own floor.

One strong access point might also do the trick but the connection is two way, it won't boost the antennas devices have now.

 

I don't think so. I've poked around and tried to see if I could get anywhere. My best bet might be a repeater, but that won't do anything for bandwitdth will it?

Maybe an upgraded router and a repeater?

 

Hmmh. How about ethernet powerline adapters... I haven't used them myself but I do have a colleague who does and they work fine for him. Max speed is like 100mbps on paper, less in reality. Those could be used to connect floors, then again either a simple access point on each floor or a mesh network. Afterall, all you would need is about 20-30mbps working speed and then limiting factor is your internet connection.

Repeaters pretty much halve the bandwidth you have, so if you now get only 3-6 mbps thru with a repeater it could be half of that (but connection to the repeater itself would be good, so there is that...) They are ancient history Mesh devices basically do the same thing but use different radio to the backchannel between mesh nodes so the speeds don't drop as much.

edit: but the problem seems to be that speeds drop a lot when passing thru floor/walls.

 

What if I got two sets of powerline adapters, then wired the two smart TV's and their laptop. That would take a few devices off the wireless and provide faster speeds to the most used devices?

 

Build a wireless antenna and make sure the point which distributes the Wlan signal is as high as possible.