When your home or office Wi-Fi network has dead spots with poor or no signal, the two main options to improve coverage are wireless range extenders or repeaters. Both help expand your existing Wi-Fi connectivity, but work differently.
Wi-Fi extenders create new wireless access points farther from your router to increase the total coverage area. They amplify very weak or non-existent signals at the edges of your router‘s range. Because extenders have dedicated network capacity, they maintain fast wireless speeds for many connected devices.
Wi-Fi repeaters boost router signals that exist but are still too weak for good performance. They capture and rebroadcast signals on your router‘s original wireless network instead of new access points. Repeaters enhance connectivity in areas like far corners of a room. But total throughput is shared, slowing speeds if many devices connect.
How Big of a Difference Do They Make?
Weak Wi-Fi connectivity isn‘t just a minor annoyance. Consider these statistics showing the major impact extenders or repeaters can provide:
- Up to 70% of homes suffer from Wi-Fi dead zones with little to no wireless signal in parts of the house (Source)
- Improving wireless coverage leads to an average 200% faster broadband speeds for devices connecting in those weak areas (Source)
- Modern activities like video streaming and video calls require 3-5x higher bandwidth for smooth performance compared to web browsing (Source)
Bottom line – insufficient Wi-Fi limits what you can do online and how many devices connect reliably throughout your home. The right extender or repeater plays a big role in addressing the problem.
Now let‘s explore more on exactly how both options work…
In-Depth: How Wi-Fi Extenders Expand Your Network
Wi-Fi extenders serve as secondary access points to take your existing network‘s signal from areas closer to the router and pass it farther out to zones with dead spots…
