Dear Guru's, In my house live 16 people(it is a very big and old house with big walls and such). We decided to get one new and very fast internet connection instead of several interfearing ADSL connections. The issue is how to distribute the Wifi correctly throughout the whole house. The house has 3 floors, with around 5 people living on each floor. My idea was to attach 3 routers on the modem and place one of those routers on each floor. The questions are: Can the routers be plugged in serial or do they need to be plugged in parallel? Serial: Router 3 in Router 2, Router 2 in Router 1, and Router 1 in the Modem or Parallel: Router 1 in Modem, Router 2 in modem and router 3 in Modem. And of course what kind of Wifi Routers do you guys recommend? I have around 160 euro to spend on the whole thing.(So around 50 euro per router) Thanks!
Assuming you have a true modem and not a router+modem combo, If you want a working LAN, then you'll need them to be connected by... Modem -> Router 1 (set up your account details here) -> Router 2,3 in AP modes (DHCP off, plugged into the switch ports not the WAN). This will make only the first router act as the firewall, routing, and only it will assign IP addresses. The other two will not serve as a router, but only as APs (you cannot access them in this mode, so you have to set them up first). This helps provide a seamless wireless connection (set them to the same SSID, WPA2 + AES). Alternatively, you can set them up so that each of them does routing (connect to first router with WAN port), but in my experience, it can cause seamless wireless connections to not work (since you'll have to be assigned a new IP/gateway). This way, you can however, access them each individually. You can also just connect them each to the modem, but you'll have to log in on each of them, plus you can't connect to other computers that are connected to the other routers. Your budget is a little bit small to fit in three decent routers, so you should prioritize the first router to be the best one since it'll be handling the routing. I would suggest you getting the ASUS N66 (the N variant, unless you want AC now), but one alone would take up 2/3 of your budget. I'm not too familiar with other routers, so you'll have to do a little research yourself in routers that are stable and capable of 2.4 + 5ghz. Also you can look into one router + two APs. Also, depending on the actual size and material of your house, you may not require three routers but only two. It also depends on the type of clients you are attaching as cellphone and tablet reception will be much worse versus a laptop or dedicated USB stick. A good practice to maximize range and speed is also to spread your routers throughout the channels if there are no nearby stations, if there are, then pick the optimal one at each level, and for clients closer to the router to use the less congested 5GHz band. I suggest using inSSIDer (home version) to check at each location the optimal band and channel as there are simply too many variables when dealing with wifi.
