About 2-3 years ago, my parents attempted to go completely wireless in their,at the time, new home. Because they’re home’s layout is so large, the signal from the wireless router that they had set up and configured on one end of the house, did not reach the other end of the house. In an attempt to remedy this issue they purchased the WGX102v2 Wall-Plugged Wireless Range Extender. On a visit to their home shortly after this purchase, they employed me to set this up for them.
This was actually a pretty neat concept. The system comes with two devices. The first one is a Wall-Plugged Ethernet Bridge. This device has a wired connection to the router and is plugged into a near by electrical outlet. The other device is the actual Wireless Range Extender Unit. The first device takes the signal from the router and transmits it through the electrical outlets in the walls. The second device receives the signals from the electrical outlet and transmits them as a wireless signal at some other designated spot in the house.
The Background
Recently my fiance and I purchased our first home together. I started to notice a similar problem where we have the wireless router at one end of the house downstairs and wireless signal strength seriously diminished upstairs at the other end of the house. I was thinking of looking into getting a wireless range extender for myself, when I learned that my parents were no longer using theirs. I decided to take theirs and use it for myself. However, getting these devices to work properly in our network has proven to be a challenge.
The Problem
The WGX102v2 Wireless Range Extender came back to me with all of my parents’ settings on the device. Even after restoring the factory settings and actually referring to the manual I could still not get the wireless computers to connect to the internet. I was able to configure the device so that the machines could recognize and connect to the wireless range extender, but no luck in actually accessing the internet.
UNRESOLVED
Currently this topic is unresolved. Although this project is more of a nice to have and a way to keep me from going out and buying a newer better wireless booster system, I’ve decided not to give up on this. I got it working once before, and if I had IssueBlogIt in place when I set it up before I would probably have captured something that would have been useful in my second deploying of these devices. Stay tuned for updates on this resolution.
We noticed your post through our news outlet and wanted to basically say that you can generally find solutions over at DD-WRT which is a great site for troubleshooting. The only real problem is sometimes you may need to actually get in touch with the manufacturer and sit on the phone with them for a bit as they can often help walk you through things if your not that network sauvy. Good luck
There are home automation devices that work the same way, like this: http://www.smarthome.com/INSTEON_howitworks.html
I wanted to make one myself but was ultimately too scared to fiddle with whole 120 volt thing.
Yeah, this device I have is a dinosaur. At some point I’m going to get wireless at top strength accessible to all areas of my house… but no time these days. If you come across a device you can recommend, or if you get the guts to actually make one do let me know. I’ll even dedicate a whole post to you and how you did it! (that is supposed to be incentive).