The IT Nerd

I live in a 850 sq. FT condo and I have my router located in my den as that is the best physical location for it. As a result, WiFi signals have to go through a concrete wall in either direction to cover my condo with WiFi. That creates dead zones. Now I have tried to address this by using Linksys High Gain Antennas, and that has improved things. But what I really need to do is to use a range extender. What range extenders do is take a WiFi signal and repeats it so that it covers a greater area. My choice  to accomplish this task is the Linksys RE6700 AC1200 Range Extender. It has this going for it. It supports the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands with speeds up to 867mbps via 802.11ac which makes it perfect for me since I have 802.11ac at home.

Here’s what it looks like:

It’s pretty compact and doesn’t look a piece of networking gear. It plugs into an AC outlet and has an AC pass through so that you don’t lose the use of that outlet.

Underneath you get a Gigabit Ethernet jack which allows you to run an Ethernet cable to the range extender to provide Internet access to a device such as a game console if you so choose. There’s also a 1/8″ audio jack on the left that allows you to serve up audio wirelessly from your laptop, smartphone or tablet. In my case, once I had the device live on my network, I could see it via AirPlay on my MacBook Pro.

Setup is easy:

1. Plug the extender into a three-pronged wall outlet somewhere between your router and wherever you have trouble getting WiFi.
2. When the light turns solid green, connect to the extender with your wireless device (in my case, I used my iPhone 6) and enter http://extender.linksys.com into your browser.
3. A setup wizard will start and that that will look for your network and ask you to connect to it on both 2.4 and 5GHz bands.
4. Next, the Spot Finder feature will show you what kind of signal strength you have between the extender and the router via a graph that has the ideal range in green. If it’s not in that green area, then you’ll have to relocate the extender to another location that gives better results.
5. Give the range extender a password.
6. Done! Declare victory and have a beer!

Once it’s set up, you connect to it using your existing network names. That way your devices just work as they normally would. The only difference being is that they get much better signal strength. Which I was able to verify by going onto my balcony, which never got WiFi prior to the arrival of the range extender, and just outside the door of my condo where WiFi never worked. Music playback worked perfectly after I plugged in a pair of powered speakers into the 1/8″ jack and used AirPlay to play music from my MacBook Pro.

Now if you’re a nerd like me, you’ll appreciate the fact that range extender has a ton of management capabilities including:

• Quality of Service (QoS)
• Security (WEP, WPA, WPA2) settings
• A site survey page which lets you view all available networks, as well as their frequency band, signal strength, and security protocol.
• A crossband page allows you to enable automatic band switching or you can manually turn crossband on and off for each band.
• An administration page lets you back up and restore configuration settings, run diagnostics, change passwords, and view traffic logs.
• The Status page displays Ethernet and wireless LAN statistics and network address (IP) information.

Most people will plug it in and forget about it though. Having said that, it’s nice that it has these features in place in case you need to tweak something.

One final item. I tested this with a Linksys WRT1900ACS, but this range extender is compatible with virtually any WiFi router or gateway including hardware from Internet service providers. Plus there’s no need to adjust your router’s settings when installing the extender.

The Linksys RE6700 AC1200 range extender goes for $120 US and if you have challenges getting WiFi to certain parts of your home, it’s very much worth a look. It is easy to set up and it works as advertised.

This entry was posted on December 2, 2015 at 10:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Linksys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.