Spork
There is no spoon
So this weekend, I was watching @pdmike Water Tower Video (thread link) and mistakenly thought his video was in 540p instead of 1080p. Turns out it was just youtube doing it's job of auto-selecting an appropriate resolution based on bandwidth (I think).
In preparation for my new job, I have moved my home office up to an unused bedroom and went about my business. I noticed the wifi wasn't as good as downstairs, but pretty usable for web surfing, but not so great for videos - ie lots of spinning circles and waiting. Anyway, it got me looking into speeding things up, so I downloaded a wifi signal strength app. My new office was just starting to get into the terrible range (over -70 db). I checked out the room that the router is in and was seeing low 50's - not good, but not bad. It's been probably 4 years since I installed the Airport Extreme (pretty good back in the day) so off to Google I went and learned about mesh networking wifi stuff. At first I was like, "this sounds like a gimmicky wifi extender", but after spending a couple hours reading up on reviews and results, I was sold.
I ended up getting the Orbi system - 1 base and 1 satellite for a tad over $300. 20 minutes later - would have only been 10 had I properly followed the instructions the first time - things were up and running. After a few tests and moving the base and satellite units around a little and now I'm seeing low 30s in the living room and in my office. The rest of the house used to be in the 60s to 80s is now in the 50s.
The internet tells me that going from -70db to -30db (office) is 10,000x better signal strength and from -50db to -30db (living room) is 100x better signal strength. It almost feels like I'm plugged in with an ethernet cable now. I'm a tech guy and very little blows me away anymore. Dude, I'm blown away. The Airport Extreme is now unplugged and sitting in the closet for whichever kid moves out first.
In preparation for my new job, I have moved my home office up to an unused bedroom and went about my business. I noticed the wifi wasn't as good as downstairs, but pretty usable for web surfing, but not so great for videos - ie lots of spinning circles and waiting. Anyway, it got me looking into speeding things up, so I downloaded a wifi signal strength app. My new office was just starting to get into the terrible range (over -70 db). I checked out the room that the router is in and was seeing low 50's - not good, but not bad. It's been probably 4 years since I installed the Airport Extreme (pretty good back in the day) so off to Google I went and learned about mesh networking wifi stuff. At first I was like, "this sounds like a gimmicky wifi extender", but after spending a couple hours reading up on reviews and results, I was sold.
I ended up getting the Orbi system - 1 base and 1 satellite for a tad over $300. 20 minutes later - would have only been 10 had I properly followed the instructions the first time - things were up and running. After a few tests and moving the base and satellite units around a little and now I'm seeing low 30s in the living room and in my office. The rest of the house used to be in the 60s to 80s is now in the 50s.
The internet tells me that going from -70db to -30db (office) is 10,000x better signal strength and from -50db to -30db (living room) is 100x better signal strength. It almost feels like I'm plugged in with an ethernet cable now. I'm a tech guy and very little blows me away anymore. Dude, I'm blown away. The Airport Extreme is now unplugged and sitting in the closet for whichever kid moves out first.
