Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit: When this thing works, the signal is great. But there's the catch: When it works. I have to power cycle this thing on a daily basis because it loses connection to the main router. There's a 95%+ connection strength to the main router and this thing still disconnects daily. RMA'd it to Amazon. Also, while technically you can do a single SSID this thing isn't smart enough to switch your device to the strongest signal. So while my wireless mapping software showed two SSIDs, the device only sees one and most of the time it connects to the weakest signal. So I just created a separate SSID and connect permanently to that. Problem is that the extender disconnects on a daily basis so even that sucks. So stay far away. I would think I had a defective unit, but other folks have reported the same disconnect issue and I don't trust this brand enough to expect a firmware update to fix the issue. **************************************************************************************************************** First of all, setup was a breeze. I don't do WPS. I just plugged the unit into the wall, turned it on and connected to the site http://extender<unique_id>. You simply choose your wireless router, put in the passkey and you're off to the races. Now here is where there was some confusion. Some people were bugged by the fact that the SSID of the extender was different and they wanted it the same for seamless roaming. Well, guess what? You can do that! During the setup, just change the default SSID that it creates to your main SSID and complete the setup. Next comes the most difficult part: Getting a good signal. ******IMPORTANT******* Before you do anything else, UPDATE THE EXTENDER TO THE LATEST FIRMWARE!!! There's a bug in the firmware that ships with this thing that will give you a less than optimal signal no matter where it's located. Fix this first. It's painless. Determine the layout of your house. I bought this extender because my wireless signal barely made it to my upstairs master bedroom which is on opposite ends of the house. I got one bar. Hell, my next door neighbor's signal was stronger than my downstairs router! I had to determine why the signal sucked so bad. Well basically the master bedroom is above the garage and the wireless router is in the family room downstairs. The signal had to go through two walls and then the ceiling. So the key is putting the extender in a location where it gets a great signal from the router and then can pass that signal to where you need it with as few barriers as possible. I noticed that my kid's bedroom gets an awesome signal because it's right smack dab above the router. So I placed the extender right below my bedroom...in the garage. So all in all when the signal gets to my bedroom it only has to pass through the ceiling in the garage. Only you know the layout of your home so no one can tell you where the best place is. You just have to do an informal wireless survey with the extender using the following method: When you move the extender to a location that you think is optimal, don't leave it to chance. The orange LED stays solid with a good connection to your router. The only problem with that is the router defines "Good" as 50% or higher. I don't know about you, but 50% of a signal isn't good from my point of view. So just connect to the router's web interface and it will give you a real percentage. This is what I call the "first hop". You want that first hop to be as close to 100% as possible and the extended signal as close as possible to where you need it. It's a delicate balance. If that first hop has a crappy signal, then it won't matter how close you put the extender to where you need it and vice versa. In my case, the best first hop I could get was 90% in the garage because the router's signal had to go through one wall. After all was said and done, the best I got was three bars which is better than the one bar or none that I had before. But all that mattered was the Internet throughput. Each time I moved the extender, I went to www.speedtest.net to see what my speed was like. It wasn't as fast as my ethernet connection downstairs, but it doesn't need to be. It's plenty fast for streaming movies on my tablet in bed. I know this was long-winded, but I want this to be the go-to review where you shouldn't have to read 50 reviews just to come to a decision. I'm a highly technical IT person so when I say it was simple to set up, I'm speaking from that point of view. But seriously, it took me less than 10 minutes to plug it in and get it connected to the Internet. Tweaking takes a much longer time.