Does wifi extender affect speed?

Thanks for asking this question.

In a wifi setup the internet speed depends on

1. The main connection speed. How fast the line at your place actually is?

2. The speed of devices. Do they support the latest standard? Are they capable of processing max throughput?

3. How many devices are accessing the medium at once? Wifi is a shared access protocol. For small number of devices the waiting time is negligible and can be safely ignored. But as the devices increase the channel may get congested and you may feel the speed going down even though max amount of time is spent waiting to get the access of the network.

Now with these points in mind it’s easy to see that wifi can’t possibly increase the line speed. Assuming that you have the best client as well as access point hardware, wifi extender will increase the perceived speed by decongesting the channel.

Think of it as increasing the number of queues at a ticket counter. A single queue will have the longest waiting time. 2 queues will halve the waiting time and so on.

With an extender your client devices will have more communication paths to talk with your main line internet.

In the best case you want your extender to be connected via a cable to your modem. Although it can also be connected wirelessly (provided that the wireless connection does not use the same channel as used by other client devices)

On the flip side if you extended your WiFi with the same channel that other client devices are using then you simply add a bottleneck. Instead of adding 2 queues you double the length of your first queue.

Workrock Enterprise

WRE

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