I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but the gist is that I have a long and narrow apartment and my WRT32X's WiFi range is not great at either of the far ends of the apartment. I have ethernet run to both ends of the apartment and was thinking that I could install dumb access points at ends of my apartment and disable the one in the middle. Is this a reasonable solution? If so, what kind of hardware should I get to do this?
If not, what other solutions should I look into?
I personally think you should place each your router covering half of your apartment at least so you only need one more router as an AP. If speed is not an issue then I guess Atheros based units are cheap and easily accessible for Dumb APs. They may work up to 4-5 MBytes/s for WiFi speed.
Thanks for the suggestion about the APs. I'll check them out.
The way my apartment is set up is our internet line comes in at a closet in the middle of our apartment and the ethernet jacks at either end of the apartment terminate in this closet, so I need some device there to link the internet to the cables. I'm not sure how I can do it otherwise.
I guess you can get two cheap routers from Tp-Link and connect them with LAN to main router and it should be enough for you.
In an apartment house all the neighbors will be on 2 GHz (as well as interference from non-wifi 2 GHz devices such as microwave ovens, cordless phones, baby monitors etc) so you really should try to move all your wifi to 5 GHz.
You could place a managed switch in the central closet so you can have the raw Internet and your LAN travel over the one cable that goes from the closet to to a router at one of the ends.
Good to know. With a managed switch like that, would it take any responsibilities from my OpenWrt router?
And are there any good 5 GHz access points you can recommend?
One thing I found with my WRT32X is that DFS channels don't really work on it because of something with the mwlwifi driver having problems, so it would be nice to knock out two birds with one stone if I can get a decent 5 GHz where the DFS channels will work too.
For AP uses, ipq40xx based devices would be a pretty good option.
Looks good. I see some reasonably priced Linksys with this chip.
What's the best way to use a device like this as a "dumb" access point? Should I install OpenWrt on it as well?