Router question for mainly wired lan

When buying a router, you don't need to buy for what you have right now, you need to buy for what you'll likely have and need support for in the future. Most people keep a router for much longer than any other equipment, so getting a good dual band N router was a great decision. The AC router may be good for some people, but if you are just making the move to dual band and N, you surely won't need AC for years(if ever). I have the retail version of the Asus RT-N66U which is the N66R(exact same thing, just sold in retail stores) and it is absolutely amazing. I've got 450Mbps theoretical bandwidth on EACH channel(2.4/5GHz) so I'm good to go. When I was doing research on routers, AC was still early in Draft and was buggy, and there were no devices AC compatible, so there was no reason to get an AC router.

Most wifi range extenders (sold as such) are horribly overpriced.

If by plug-in extenders you mean something like this, then it is just a beefy wifi dongle. Will work on computers but not on phones/tablets.

What you can do is getting an access point. That's basically a wifi router without the modem, so it needs an ethernet cable or connection to the wifi of the main router to work.
Most can do repeater, extender, bridge or create their own network.
This for example. Even has a weird "power over ethernet" feature which allows to connect the power brick to the ethernet cable (with a thingy they provide) and power it up with only the ethernet cable.
Yeah, doesn't have gigabit ethernet.

With those devices you can try various configurations, like turning off the wifi of your router and make your wifi from the access point. Which means you can place it wherever you have an ethernet cable, so possibly in a better position than where the modem-router is. Being a wifi router itself, it has the usual security options.
Or setting it as an extender to sense the wifi from the router and re-broadcast it.
Or act as a bridge as explained above when talking of media bridges.

And yeah, they don't usually cost more than 40-60$, but they are the swiss-army knives of wifi networking.

bobafetthotmail said:

Most wifi range extenders (sold as such) are horribly overpriced.

If by plug-in extenders you mean something like this, then it is just a beefy wifi dongle. Will work on computers but not on phones/tablets.I use really good and well working extenders

I guess it depends what you consider as "horribly overpriced". My Belkin extenders are the best I have ever used and work amazingly well, price €70 (£60, $70) and they most certainly are something much more than "just a beefy wifi dongles", as told here: More router questions

I guess it depends what you consider as "horribly overpriced".

Clarification: they offer only range extension and cost as an access point that can do anything.

they most certainly are something much more than "just a beefy wifi dongles"

did you check the link in that sentence? The one in the link is indeed a beefy usb dongle. I'm not certain of what he meant with "little plug in extenders" and the one in the link does qualify as "little" and as "plug-in". It's sold as "extender" or "booster" too.

Bob, my only point was to tell that with $70 dollars you can get really good extenders, and if you really need one that is not too expensive.

Everything you said is valid, I just offered a slightly different opinion.

:) Kari

yeah, the problem is mine here. I should have been more clear, as "horribly overpriced" didn't convey my opinion in an useful way for the OP.
Thanks for pointing that out.

For the second thing I'll just blame the language barrier.

lucasbuck said:

I should have been more clear. I mean power outlet plug in, like this one here or here. So you wouldn't have to hook it into your LAN. I didn't have a LAN plug in the area I was going to put it. I just thought they might be bad since I think they all connect with WPS.

You don't need to use WPS to connect it You can access an extenders configuration settings the same way as your routers via it's IP address.

   Note

You may need to temporarily assign a static IP address in order to set it up correctly however each are different and the user manual should give you sufficient information on how to set it up

Josh :)