Wifi draft N setup help

mav2000

mav2000

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Hi guys, I need a sasta sundar tikao Wireless N setup at home. Am using a Wireless G now and some of the rooms fail to get a signal...so couple of questions:

1. Will my phone which is a Mileston with b/g wifi get a etter siganl throughout the house afte shifting to N or will it still be pathetic?

2. Model numbers and brands of good, decent, CHEAP N equipment
 
All N routers work with B/G equipment just fine, there may be some that fall back to the slowest devices' speed. It is not necessary to change modes. I have an ordinary single band N router and a few G devices and a few N devices, they work together just fine (including transfers between G and N devices).

Some N routers may have worse signal than some G routers. My Linksys WRT54G2 had much better signal strength and consistency than the Asus N13-U I'm using now. Just the spec does not guarantee better signal.

You could use a cheap G router in repeater/bridge mode to help reach dark spots, if you just need to use the network for browsing.

Be prepared to spend about 3K for the router and about 2K each for dongles. If you have Windows 7, be warned a lot of N devices are not officially certified yet and driver support may be a little problematic. I use a Belkin N dongle and it took some tinkering to get it to work, and even then it does occasionally drop signal.
 
Avoid going for really cheap N routers. Like cranky said, in a lot of cases they perform worse than some decent G routers. If you have to go N, go for a decent unit, otherwise stick with G.
 
cranky said:
All N routers work with B/G equipment just fine, there may be some that fall back to the slowest devices' speed. It is not necessary to change modes. I have an ordinary single band N router and a few G devices and a few N devices, they work together just fine (including transfers between G and N devices).

Some N routers may have worse signal than some G routers. My Linksys WRT54G2 had much better signal strength and consistency than the Asus N13-U I'm using now. Just the spec does not guarantee better signal.

You could use a cheap G router in repeater/bridge mode to help reach dark spots, if you just need to use the network for browsing.

Be prepared to spend about 3K for the router and about 2K each for dongles. If you have Windows 7, be warned a lot of N devices are not officially certified yet and driver support may be a little problematic. I use a Belkin N dongle and it took some tinkering to get it to work, and even then it does occasionally drop signal.
Click to expand...
Do you knw any good Wireless N dongles that work well with Windows 7? I was planning to get 1 from Monoprice. Whats your take on that?
 
@apextwin: I did get my Belkin N stable. Most of the adapters with the Ralink chipsets should work after all updates and patches, just use the ralink drivers off the site or windows Update instead of the ones with the dongle.

@mav2000: The cost of a repeater is usually pretty high, I would look at using a regular cheap router instead. In Linksys devices you can switch the device to 'router' mode (instead of 'Gateway', which is technically what it normally does), Asus devices have a dedicated 'repeater' mode (at least mine does).
 
Would a Belkin have that option as well? I have a Belkin now which I could then use as a repeater and buy a new Asus or something as the main router. BTW is a computer required to do this, or is it stand alone, and how do you set it up...
 
Since Google is turning up no positive answers, I assume it does not.

And yes, you need to connect the router to a PC using a LAN cable for first-time configuration, type in the address of the router (something like 192.168.x.x) and it will ask for a password. This information should be in your manual and is changeable on the first-time config (and any other time) through the router's web interface, which will show up once you type in the password and will allow to to change whatever is possible in the settings.
 
@Cranky - Thanks a lot for the information sir.
Found one on the monoprice site itself
<<http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=105&cp_id=10501&cs_id=1050105&p_id=5334&seq=1&format=2>>
 
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