Netgear EX7300 WiFi Extender
We’ve lived in our current house for a bit over a year now but we’ve recently changed rooms, so from one end of the house to the other. We used to be on the same side of the house as the router so wifi was never an issue, but in our new room it was spotty at best, enter the Netgear EX7300 WiFi Extender (full name, Nighthawk X4 WiFi Range Extender). I’ve had a Netgear router for the past several years (the WNDR3700 dual band router) which has served me well and continues to do so, and therefore I was pre-disposed to the brand already, when looking for the wifi extender.
Netgear EX7300
After tossing up between the bulkier EX7000 and this one, I decided to go with this one due to its smaller design. Setup was pretty easy, just follow the steps on the quick start guide and you should be fine, although the setup prompt didn’t work on my mac mini (setup button didn’t launch anything), it worked as expected using my ipad.
Installation
I just went with the default setup to begin with, so extending both 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands on my router (which appends _ext to create two new network SSIDs) and tried that for a couple of days. It seemed to work initially, but after some use (maybe thirty minutes) the internet would either drop out (connection was fine) or the connection would die and it would be impossible to reconnect. There also seemed to be a problem with the old SSIDs on the router as the internet became unstable when connected to those as well (near the router of course), even the one device connected by LAN seemed to have issues.
Troubleshooting
I tried assigning static IPs to everything in the house which didn’t really change anything, so the final step was to try the FastLane function. This combines both frequencies from the extender to strengthen the signal meaning you use only one SSID. So I went with combining the 2.4gHz into the 5gHz band and voilà, so far so good. We haven’t had any issues with dropping out or connection in the past few days and the speed has been very solid.
Range
Currently it’s only sitting about 7m (through a wall or two) from the router (in a floor outlet) and running at 100% power, I had a quick check of the range out the back of the house and it extends out to the backyard but while the WiFi is connected at two bars all the way out the back (probably 15-20m through a few walls) the internet didn’t seem to work. Just outside the back door, through the same walls but with possibly less environmental interference, the connection still worked reasonably well, so I don’t think I need to worry about leechers stealing my internet from the reserve.
