Guide to Faster internet for SOHO units by using Extenders; Cheaper and Faster!

If you’re living in a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO), apartment, condominium or any high-rise building, there’s actually a huge advantage that you have up your sleeves that gives you access to faster internet without paying the extra. This can be achieved by sharing the internet between two units and opting for a higher package. Today we will teach you how to do this and the difference that you could get by doing so. There are two methods to achieve this; either using an additional Access Point in which you would need to extend a LAN cable or using Wireless Extender to extend Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi connectivity. The former is of course much preferred but we will run through BOTH methods.

I’m keeping most of the settings as default to keep this guide as layman as possible to serve the non-technical followers. I will also try to refrain from using too much technical terms and explain them where necessary. If you need technical assistance, please discuss it in the comments section so we can elaborate accordingly and not confuse the non-technical readers – for whom this guide is tailored.

What You Need

A good internet setup requires excellent hardware and while you are free to choose your hardware, we are going to use some top-notch networking devices for this:

• ASUS RT-AC5400 as our base router
• ASUS RP-AC68U as our Access Point / Repeater

If you are expert in buying, you should be able to get BOTH of these under RM3,300. These hardware will be able to serve you even when our local internet reaches 1Gbps so it’s future ready. Apart from that, I chose the RP-AC68U extender because it will work for BOTH setups that we are achieving and honestly, it looks sexy!

ROG Rapture GT-AC5300 (left) vs RT-AC5300 (right) – in case you have extra budget for the ROG one :P

ASUS RP-AC68U Dual-band Wireless-AC1900 with no-antenna design

Next, you need an upgraded internet package. In my case, my unit uses Time Fibre and I’ll be simulating a huge difference between 10Mbps and 100Mbps on the same network. For your case, if you’re using Time Fibre Home, you have options for 100Mbps that costs you RM149/mo, 300Mbps that costs you RM189/mo and whopping 500Mbps that costs you RM299/mo.

Assuming you are using 100Mbps package, upgrading to 500Mbps and splitting the bill between both units, you will literally still be paying the same amount, but multiplying your speeds up to 5 times! If you want to try 300Mbps first and settle with even lesser monthly bill, that’s entirely your choice.

100Mbps (left) vs 500Mbps (right). Both of these are FTTH packages, dedicated for your home.

Now, you can choose which method you would like to go with and select the tab accordingly. If you use the Access point method, you will need to extend a LAN cable to your neighbour’s unit which can be tedious, but since we’re talking about SOHO, it should cause less mess. If you use the Wireless Extender method, you will not need any wires, but the unit that will be housing the extender will have a very minimal ping difference – which can also be omitted still.

Regardless of the setup you choose, your base router will still have be configured normally (PPPoE in our network type) and you will need DHCP capabilities which your router should already have by default. In any case, I will guide you quickly in setting up your base router. You would need to access your router’s admin panel. For the ASUS RT-AC5300, you can access this via http://router.asus.com

Head over to the “WAN” page and set the network type to PPPoE and insert your username and password that was provided to you.

Click to view full size image

If you’re using the RT-AC5300, you have an option to enable 5GHz Smart Connect feature that will combine BOTH 5GHz using the same SSID and function as a load balanced band. This means, without you realizing, devices connected to the 5GHz band could be either connected to the first band or second band depending on the load on either one. You can also define the Smart Connect rules accordingly based on the bandwidth utilization, Physical Rate (PHY), Steering Trigger Policies (STA selection), and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) strength. This is a very interesting option that the RT-AC5300 has, but it’s entirely up to you if you want to enable it as it might slightly affect the connectivity of the extender if you’re using Wireless Extender method. If you’re using the Access Point method, go ahead, enable it and play around with the tweaks. You can enable this from “Wireless” page and selecting the 5GHz band, then enable the Smart Connect option.

Then head to “Network Tools” -> “Smart Connect Rule” to access the plethora of settings available to you to tweak this.

If this looks to technical to you, just disable the Smart Connect feature and setup two separate SSIDs for both 5GHz bands so you can identify which band you would want to connect to. However, the load balancing will not be managed and you will have to manually switch between different SSIDs.

Another important thing you need to consider is the physical port that you will be connecting to. Depending on your ISP, specific ports will be reserved for IPTV and connecting to these ports will result in no internet connection. You may want to identify this and avoid connecting your extender to this port. To do this, go to the “LAN” page -> “IPTV” tab.

For example, if you’re using Maxis-Fiber, the LAN3 will be dedicated to IPTV and when you plug your extender to it, your extended internet will just not work (because the dedicated port will be assigned respective VID and have a totally different IP outside the DHCP table). With that, you’re pretty much good to go.

It’s best that you reset the extender before beginning with this guide. Turn on the RP-AC68U and hit the reset button for 10 seconds. It will revert to default altogether. If you can’t find the reset button, that’s because it’s located at the bottom of the device ;)

Now…

So it seems like the speed on Access Point mode and the Wireless Extender is very similar. Then why did I recommend the Access Point method? That’s because, using the wireless extender will result in an inconsistent ping which is not something you would like if you need ping intensive tasks done on the extender, for example gaming. More often than not, the ping will spike for a while before returning back to it’s normal speed which is a matter of life and death in a game.

Conclusion

There we go. Today we have learnt how to extend our internet between two SOHO units and using a much faster internet, get higher speeds without burning our pockets. The experience is definitely remarkable. Additionally, you can always use this guide to extend the internet on the top floor of your house if you do not get good network coverage on the first (or second) floor. Just follow the steps for either methods and you will be good to go.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments below and I’ll be more than happy to answer them accordingly :)