I’m trying to figure out if I really need more powerful equipment or if my current system is simply flawed.
The main router is in one room and has no problem reaching full speed via Ethernet. The next room is the living room, but there’s a thick concrete wall between them. I placed a second router next to this wall and connected it wirelessly to the first router. The second router provides more or less acceptable speeds.
The TV is in one of those built-in niches in the wall, essentially squeezed in on several sides. The TV’s Wi-Fi is poor there, so I tried placing another old router behind the TV and connecting it wirelessly to the second router, then running an Ethernet cable from this router to the TV. But I’m still not satisfied with the results.
So now I’m wondering: will buying a more powerful router help, or is the whole system simply flawed?
Every time you repeat Wi-Fi over Wi-Fi, especially with cheap routers doing extender duty, you lose performance and usually reliability too. Then you stuck the last hop behind a TV inside a wall recess, which is also terrible for signal. So no, a “more powerful” router probably won’t magically fix a bad layout.
The setup is the problem. You’re taking one wireless link, turning it into two wireless hops, and then ending at a TV that’s sitting in a recessed cavity. A stronger router won’t fix the fact that every hop adds loss and instability.
@MemoryEffective51 Agreed. The first router is fine. The issue starts when you use Wi-Fi as backhaul through a concrete wall. Then you add a second wireless repeat behind the TV, which is about the worst possible place for it. That’s not really a router power issue. That’s attenuation plus repeated wireless retransmission.
So even if I replace one of them with a better router, it probably won’t change much?
I’d start by checking it with a Wi-Fi analyzer like NetSpot. That’ll tell you pretty quickly whether the signal near the TV is just trash, or if that whole wireless hop through the wall is already struggling.