In my house, I have the following setup:
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Ground floor: My ISP's wireless router and an 8-port switch. For wireless communication I use the ISP's Wifi and the 8-port switch is used for wired rj45 sockets around the house.
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1st Floor: I have a TP-LINK TL-WR740N Wireless Lite N Router 150 MBps which I connected to a socket and have a PC connect with wire on it and also used for Wifi. The Wifi network I setup on the 1st floor is different than the one on the ground floor (2 routers).
At the first floor I have the problem that in other bedrooms far from the router the Wifi signal (either gets lost) or it's very low. So I bought a TP-LINK TL-WA701ND Wireless N Access Point 150MBps which I configured as universal repeater.
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1st issue: The access point supports only WEP encryption when used as repeater/universal repeater so I changed the wifi of the router to WEP with ASCII with 128bit character length and established the connection.
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2nd issue: The most important now is that even though the Wifi signal in the bedroom with the AP is full, when I switch off the wifi of the iPad and back on, it is not connecting to the internet. Yesterday I noticed that it was giving me the ethernet card IP (169.…). I went close to the router with the iPhone, got connected and when came back to the room with the AP it was working but the iPad is not working.
Can I fix this without having to buy any other hardware?
Best Answer
I would start on scanning the Wifi channels near the bedrooms and near the two Wifi APs. You should check if they're in a different channel or are overlapping between the two floors. Also take note if there are other external Wifis that might be interfering with your home Wifi.
You can use inSSIDer to scan the Wifis. I'm sure there's also something similar for the iPad if you want to do the check from there.
Once scanned, you should change the Wifi channels to use the least crowded channel in order to get the most reception from it.
As for the issues, the first one is hardware based. TP-Link has some APs that are called Range Extenders, I think those are configured with one button only and support WPA2 without problem.
The second issue could be the iPad connecting to the TL-WA701ND, but this one couldn't connect to the main Wifi, that will give the iPad a wrong IP address if the DHCP is on that router or the one in the ground floor.