Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My main reason for getting this was due to a weak signal for my Ring door bell. I also had very weak signal in one of our bedrooms, but I had procrastinated on that one for years. I have an Apple 802.11ac router located in my office in the far corner of my house and it can't easily be relocated, so after reading reviews I decided to give this a try. I should note that I am a Cisco certified Network Engineer for 20+ years, so I considered a lot of different options, many of which would have driven my wife crazy. You definitely need to let the wizard create the new SSIDs as you will run into issues trying to reuse the same one as your main router. I joined it to my wireless network and it created two additional SSIDs (myname_2GEXT, and myname_5GEXT). I joined the Ring to the new SSID and took each of our mobile devices into the 'dead zone' bedroom and joined them to the new SSIDs as well. The signal strength is now excellent throughout all of these areas. We just have to make sure we've joined the new SSID when in that one bedroom. That's not a deal breaker for me. For geeks like me, RSSI dropped from -74 to -57 at my furthest corner. The price of extending the network is losing a bit more than half the speed, but I knew this coming into the project. If you manage those expectations, you will be happy also. I normally get 45-50 Mbps downloads on my main SSID. Using this extender, it drops to 15-18 Mbps. That's still plenty for streaming multiple Netflix programs at the same time. It has the added benefit of essentially rate-limiting anything that I put on the new SSIDs, meaning that any devices that use the extended network cannot use all of my available bandwidth. Unbeknownst to my kids, their games and downloads will never again ruin a conference call. I should touch on placement. You need to put this closer to your main router than to the area you're trying to cover. In my case it's only about 20' away from my router in the hallway. Wireless signal strength is greatly affected by wood and even more so by glass and metal. I suggest placing this no more than 1 closed door or 1 interior wall away from your router if possible. When planning where to put it, pick the location that is most free from interference. Most of my plugs are behind or under furniture, so that's why the hallway was chosen. I would buy this again.