Range Extender WA850RE speeds are much slower than my router Wifi
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Just purchase the TL-WA850RE (N300) range extender and got it set up to fix a dead zone in the back of my house. Setup was easy and I got it up and running in about 10 minutes. The signal was much better in the back of the house. HOWEVER, the upload and download speeds no where near what I get from my router's wifi.
House Setup: I have an ATT Arris BGW210-700 router with integrated wifi that really sucks. It is in the front of my house and I can't move it very far. So I placed the range extender in the middle of the house to help out the back. The Range extneder is showing full connectivity (all blue bars) so I I know it is working well with the rounter. After setup, I went around the house to check connectivity. I downloaded the speedcheck pro app from the play store and took measurements on both networks in 3 locations. I did this for each network and the tp line _EXT network was really slow even when standing near it in the middle of the house. I took 3 samples at each location for each network and tooke the middle value below:
ALL speeds are Mbps
| HOME Network | Signal | Ping | Down | Up |
| Front (Router) | 96% | 36 | 64.2 | 67.4 |
| middle (tp Link) | 60% | 37 | 40.4 | 22.9 |
| Back | 33% | 37 | 22.5 | 8.3 |
| HOME_EXT (tplink Extender) | ||||
| Front (Router) | 48% | 38 | 7.9 | 10.1 |
| middle (tp Link) | 91% | 36 | 13.9 | 30.1 |
| Back | 61% | 37 | 11.5 | 19.9 |
I browsed the tp link support and it gave me 2 options to try.
1. Get the latest FW. I accesed the router setup page (tplinkrepeater.net) I did that and am running the latest.
2. Enable High Speed. - This does not seem to be available with my rounter. Many places on the tplink site it told me to go to IP (192.168.0.254 or 192.168.1.1) and none of those pages resolved. Had to use tplinkrepeater.net as in #1. Once I logged in and went to advanced settings, there was no "High Speed Mode" Available
Questions:
1. What is the max speed on with the WA850RE?
2. Why is it so much slower than my router?
3. Does the network name alway have to be different: Home and Home_EXT? The FW has a way to make it the same.
Please send me good news on fixing this or I am going to return the device. Spent about hours trying to debug and fix issue. If these is just too low end of an extneder let me know.
