WIFI Boosters do they work?

[#1]

I must be a thick as a brick 

@pjmarsh but is that a "boost" of the original signal or just a relay, repeat or extension and is that relay, repeat or extension as good as the original signal or does it weaken the signal integrity? 

Is it like a bad TV signal, that if you amplify, relay, repeat or extend it, you just get a bigger bad signal? 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Its more complicated than that...

If your wifi had no errors it would be relatively simple.

But it always has some errors...

So if your PC detects an uncorrectable error on a received packet, it will send an error packet over the two legs requesting a retransmission (over the two legs!) - so if your received signal is poor you will get many errors and many retransmissions.

The same thing applies to any data uploads you do.

It's true that a repeater will not improve your signal quality though.

[#3]

@VileReynard So I guess that means, they don't really work and if you have a problem, it won't make it better, but it will allow you to have a that problem (or worse) elsewhere? 

[#4]

They can make the difference between a location getting a poor connection and no connection at all.

It's a long time since I've played around with wifi (a laptop has to take its chances).

I went to the trouble of putting Gigabit ethernet in for my desktop, TV and a couple of other nearby devices years ago.

Have you tried the simple things to improve wifi - such as placing your router higher up (say 6 feet) instead of near the floor with nothing obviously blocking it?

[#5]

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@VileReynard wrote:

I went to the trouble of putting Gigabit ethernet in for my desktop, TV and a couple of other nearby devices years ago.

Me too and it was well worth the effort.

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[#6]

We ran flat ethernet cable along the skirting board, up the stairs, under the carpet to a switch in the back bedroom.

[#7]

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@VileReynard wrote:

So if your PC detects an uncorrectable error on a received packet, it will send an error packet over the two legs requesting a retransmission (over the two legs!) - so if your received signal is poor you will get many errors and many retransmissions.

The same thing applies to any data uploads you do.

It's true that a repeater will not improve your signal quality though.

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So many things wrong with the above it's basically just garbage, sorry. It seems rather self-contradictory.

If you've got a device a long distance away from the primary wifi router, it would have a poor signal. If you put a wifi repeater halfway between the device and the primary wifi router, then you'll have a better signal between the primary wifi router and the wifi repeater, and a better signal between the wifi repeater and the device that's a long distance away from the primary wifi router. That's how a wifi repeater could improve the signal quality.

[#8]

Do you think that a £9-55 box does signal recovery?

It's surely just an amplifier - not a genuine repeater which would do rather better, but cost rather more.

[#9]

But surely as the signal drops with distance the SNR will reduce, potentially introducing errors. Amplifying the signal midway will improve the SNR on the second leg and thereby improve the signal quality?

[#10]

Amplifying the signal will give a better overall SNR and this will increase the distance that the wifi is usable over.

The downside is that the inevitable errors present in all wifi will still require a double traversal over both legs resulting in a very poor speed, due to all the retransmissions required.

If the intermediate device was intelligent and could "deal with" errors in the proper manner this ought to give a much faster link.

Perhaps a spare router configured in bridge mode (effectively converting it into an access point) would do the job?

[#11]

I agree that both legs will be susceptible to errors. My point is that the higher the SNR that can be maintained the fewer the number of errors that will appear.

At the end of the day I know that we both agree that an Ethernet cable with a WAP on the end is a far better solution.

[#12]

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@VileReynard wrote:

It's surely just an amplifier - not a genuine repeater which would do rather better, but cost rather more.

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I don't think there's any such thing as "just an amplifier" for wifi, the concept makes no sense. You couldn't have a device that just retransmitted whatever it received. It's nonsense. Wifi doesn't work like that. I think any wireless repeater, regardless of however it is marketed as a "booster" or "extender", is going to connect as a client device to the main access point, while also operating as an access point itself. Yes it could be sold for £10 although you wouldn't expect it to be a particularly good quality device.

If there is going to be an actual wifi signal amplifier, such as device would be something that connects to an antenna socket (for devices with removable wifi antennas, you could replace the antennas with higher gain ones).

[#13]

@Baldrick1 No I'm not saying that at all however there is going to be a certain point where it becomes less usable than more. Usually the less usable point is exactly where your plug socket is 

[#14]

@steveocee 

This is very true. I recently plugged one in at the far corner of my living room. I did this because in this part of my house I get a stronger 2.4GHz signal from my neighbour's router than I do from mine. I keep manually changing my 2.4GHz channel to stay away from his and every time his reboots (it's a Smarthub 6 so it's fortnightly) it decides to use my channel again. The idea of placing the extender where I did was that it was as close as I could get to his router location so I was trying to force his router's auto channel select to use a different channel.

Because the extender was much closer to my devices they started using this rather than the router. The result was that WiFi was far inferior with the extender plugged to that without in despite of my devices having an excellent connection to the extender. I then looked at the extender and noted that it was showing a poor connection with the router. It did however drive my neighbour's router away.  Ho, Humm!

Obviously the extender needs to be plugged in at a distance where it still has a good connection with the router if you are to stand any chance of it helping.

[#15]

Or install a mesh network, that doesn't seem to have been considered here.