I've been researching wifi extenders. I've seen many that plug into wall outlets. Our house has cat 5e cable access throughout, and I'm wondering if anyone knows if wifi extenders exist that can be plugged into a cat 5e access in the same manner as those made for wall outlets.
The extenders basically send a signal across your household wiring and if you have two branch circuits for outlets on different legs in the breaker panel, or even a very long electrical wire run, your speed will vary. You are best to use the Cat-5 for Ethernet, if you are able to separate those lines from the telephone lines if your house was wired for Telephone to have Cat-5, since it is now becoming the norm.
I use a Engenius EAP-1750H Access Point in my house and it uses Power over Ethernet. I can get at the 150 foot range and still have 7mbps of the 50mbps down that I get. Inside the house I get between 35-50mbps, depending on where I am.
If you can setup multiple Access Points for expanding coverage, that is the better way to go. If you cannot, then you will have to take the Cate-5 and set them up for those that you want telephone to be on their own group and those that you want to be for networking, placed on a patch panel.
It is surprisingly difficult these days to find a wifi access point that connects to main router via cable in UK stores. Everything tends to be wifi only extenders.
Easiest solution is to buy another router, connect it via lan port to lan port, and set lan static ip to be in same subnet as main router, and turn off dhcp.
If you have cable a extender will cost a lot more than getting a router. A router will give you 3 Ethernet ports as well as wireless
Linksys RE6500 has two modes - wireless range extender and wired range extender. I'm using it as a WiFi repeater, have not tested the wired repeater mode, but the option is there in firmware:
P-RE6500 | WIRELESS RANGE EXTENDERS | Wired and Wireless Range Extenders | For Home | Linksys Products | Linksys Site USA
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