The Internet is everywhere in our lives these days. Whether it be at home, school, restaurants, bookstores ­­­or even in our churches, people have come to rely on having fast, stable access to the Internet.­­ Recently, I began looking for a way to extend my high-speed internet connection at home out to the far edges of my home. Like many, our internet connection is brought into our home at one corner of the house and the speed and stability of the connection degrades the further away you get from the Wi-Fi router.

My first step was to get a dual-band Wi-Fi router (Asus AC1900) which broadcasts at both 2.4Ghz and on the faster, less crowded 5Ghz band. This helped immensely and was sufficient for what we needed for a couple of years. Now, we are wanting to begin using a large storage building as a game room and hang out place for our kids and their friends, but one issue we are having is that our wireless Internet is not reaching that far, even with the great router that we installed.

My first step was to get a dual-band Wi-Fi router (Asus AC1900) which broadcasts at both 2.4Ghz and on the faster, less crowded 5Ghz band. This helped immensely and was sufficient for what we needed for a couple of years. Now, we are wanting to begin using a large storage building as a game room and hang out place for our kids and their friends, but one issue we are having is that our wireless Internet is not reaching that far, even with the great router that we installed.

After researching my various options I settled on the TP-Link AC1750 Wi-Fi Range Extender as a good choice for what I needed. I ordered it from Amazon for $62.99 and once it arrived, setup was a breeze. I simply plugged it into an outlet near my current router and then walked through the simple steps provided. It took perhaps five minutes and it was fully up and running. All I had to do then was unplug it and move it to a room closest to the storage building. Once the led ring on the device shows blue, that means it has a good connection and it begins broadcasting on both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wireless bands.

Once setup, I saw a dramatic increase in speed and strength of my wireless connection in a place where I essentially had no connection previously. Before, if we stood in just the right spot, we were getting perhaps one bar of connection strength and 1-2 MB download speeds. After connecting the extender, our wireless connection was at full strength and speedtest.net showed a download speed of 131 MB which is not too far off of our max speed of 200 MB our internet provider supplies.

Another benefit of the device is that we can set it up with the same SSID as our home network which makes it then act more like a mesh network. Keeping the same SSID means we don’t have to connect to a new network ID when moving throughout the home, office or church building. I have noticed that there is occasional lag in response on the extender but that is not enough of an issue to outweigh the benefits. In short, I recommend this as a cost-effective way to extend high-speed Internet in larger buildings such as a church building, office or home.