Airport Extreme roaming network & cabling

[mj12albert]

I have a Airport Extreme (3rd gen) with a Mac Mini and PC hard-wired to it which has been working great for the past 5 years. In the past year or two, there has been a ton of wireless devices added to my household: 4 iPhones, 3 iPads, 2 laptops, and a Kindle.

Problem is, I live in Hong Kong in an apartment with really thick concrete walls. Sometimes when my MBA is outside of the room where the AE is, I move the laptop by a couple of inches and the wifi connection goes from perfect to dead. So I figure I'd get a another AE to create a roaming network to fix this.

My question is, would there be a noticeable difference in the connection speed of my wired devices between connecting them to the primary AE (the one that's connected to the modem) versus connecting them to the secondary AE (the one that's connected to the first AE) ??

Also, does it matter what kind of cable (cat5/5e/6/6a) I use to connect the two AEs together? My broadband is advertised to be 1000Mb...

 

[NukeIT]

My question is, would there be a noticeable difference in the connection speed of my wired devices between connecting them to the primary AE (the one that's connected to the modem) versus connecting them to the secondary AE (the one that's connected to the first AE) ??

Also, does it matter what kind of cable (cat5/5e/6/6a) I use to connect the two AEs together? My broadband is advertised to be 1000Mb...

You shouldn't notice a difference if both routers are Gigabit then there should be little to no degradation.

I would go with 5e or 6. I don't know the cost difference in HK

You have Gigabit internet connection??

 

[mj12albert]

I would go with 5e or 6. I don't know the cost difference in HK

You have Gigabit internet connection??

For cables, cost difference is negligible – they are all from China and cheap.

And yep, my broadband is supposedly a gigabit connection (that I don't fully take advantage of).

There was only 1 ISP in my area for the longest time, and we've been using them since dial-up in 1996/7. But last year a new upstart ISP moved in, and we got a free upgrade from 100Mb to 1000Mb.

 

[NukeIT]

For cables, cost difference is negligible – they are all from China and cheap.

And yep, my broadband is supposedly a gigabit connection (that I don't fully take advantage of).

There was only 1 ISP in my area for the longest time, and we've been using them since dial-up in 1996/7. But last year a new upstart ISP moved in, and we got a free upgrade from 100Mb to 1000Mb.

Then I would future proof and go with cat 6. Same money better cable.

Gigabit internet would be awesome. Not that I need it but of course I want it. Here in the States there are just a few locations where Gigabit is available. Hopefully sooner rather then later it will be available everywhere.

 

[Altemose]

Then I would future proof and go with cat 6. Same money better cable.

Gigabit internet would be awesome. Not that I need it but of course I want it. Here in the States there are just a few locations where Gigabit is available. Hopefully sooner rather then later it will be available everywhere.

And I thought I was special with my 110 Mbps down connection through Comcast...

 

[eduardrw]

If you can afford it get the new TC - it has a significantly better WIFI range.
Then connect the Airport Extreme via ethernet cable to the adjacent room and create a roaming WIFI network.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4260?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

This should give you plenty of performance.
The bottleneck in your case will be WIFI throughput.

Post a http://www.speedtest.net result of your high speed connection for us to be jealous.