[BigMike]

I am probably going to move to the basement of a 3 story house. The router is on the top floor, and doesn't make it to the basement very well. What is the best way to extend the network? I know there are repeaters, ways to turn routers into repeaters, etc. What is the best way to go about this, what would you do?

I currently have a Linksys router in my apartment, and where I'm moving has a Linksys router as well. Not sure the model on either, but I can find out.

 

[Silver]

I'd run an ethernet line to the basement.

Few things are as annoying as a flaky wireless network...

 

[BigMike]

I was thinking of coming out of the router upstairs and running a line to it downstairs. That sounds the most stable, but it will also be annoying to have two networks in the same house....

 

[binary visions]

Two networks?

Why would you have two networks?

 

[BigMike]

Two networks?

Why would you have two networks?

sorry, I suck at explaining things. I would come out of the upstairs router and into a downstairs wireless router. That would create two wireless networks, would it not? If I plug in from one router to another, can it just "extend" the network?

 

[binary visions]

Two things:

Networks are segregated primarily by IP addresses not by what particular hardware you have. The amount of hardware you can put into a network is only limited by the IP address space - which is not a practical limit. If you simply assign an IP address to the router that's within the current subnet - or allow the upstairs router to automatically assign it an IP address - you will be within the current network.

Second, okay, I see where you're going - you need wireless in the basement (when you agreed with Silver's suggestion I thought you were just going to plug the ethernet cable into the computer in the basement). The way to ensure the best quality signal would be to buy something like a Linksys WAP54G, a wireless access point, and run the ethernet cable downstairs into that. The WAP can also act as a repeater, though, so if the signal is at all decent you don't have to run a cable at all.

Whatever your current Linksys model is, will likely not be able to act as a repeater (since few people own the more flexible access point, they own the router instead) without third party firmware. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try a third party firmware. If not, you'll need to run an ethernet line.