Old Airport Express vs New

[markus-karlsson]

Hi.
I'm currently on a wireless network. I'm moving location within the building and need to be on the same network. The new location is a few doors down from the airport express currently setup as the router for our network. So i have of course lost a bit of signal strength. Normally i get something like 40/mbs up and down but in the new location it has dropped to around 12.

I was hoping that getting another Airport Express to use as an extender would boost the signal to my new location but before i did that I brought in an old airport express to try it out first. But not much happened, i was still on around 12/mbs up and down (?). My question is: the current network router is a new Airport Express which we got only a couple of months ago. Could this be the reason why my signal didnt improve at all when testing the old airport express as the extender?

I just want to try and avoid getting a new one only to find out it wont do much either.

cheers!
/markus

 

[kakapo]

I am no expert, but I've been looking at getting an Express as an iTunes server and the reviews I've read (just found through Google) indicate that the current Express has no better range than the previous model.

 

[priitv8]

If I read it correctly, OP's problem is wireless connection between 2 locations. The Express won't get better reception in new location than the laptop does, so there's only 12Mbps to share, to begin with. Minus the wifi overhead of wireless extension.
To have any improvement, you need to wire the 2 access points together.

 

[kakapo]

As priitv8 indicated, I think I misinterpreted the OP. If you use an Express to wirelessly extend your network then you lose 1/2 the bandwidth in overhead. If you wire them together and set both to same SSID, password, security, etc. then you get larger wifi footprint w/ the original speed.