WiFi Range Extender

 

Should You Buy a WiFi Range Extender?

CR tested popular models and learned that they can cure WiFi woes—but only in certain situations

When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission.

To anyone with a slow, spotty internet connection, WiFi range extenders sound like a bargain.

You buy one for as little as $20, plug it into an outlet, and your problem is solved.

Or so the marketing goes.

The truth, however, is more nuanced.

As testing by Consumer Reports shows, WiFi range extenders can be useful in certain situations, but you shouldn’t necessarily think of them as a slam-dunk fix for your WiFi woes.

MORE ON WIFI COVERAGE

CR's WiFi Extender Ratings

How to Get a Stronger WiFi Signal

Best Mesh WiFi Router Systems for $250 or Less

Best Wireless Routers of the Year

How to Boost Your Router Security

In some cases, according to our testing, a mesh router system may be a better solution. Those have two or three units that work together to spread WiFi more evenly throughout your home.

The problem is that a good mesh router setup starts at around $150. You’ll pay even more if you want cutting-edge features like WiFi 6E.

With all of that in mind, we set out to see just how effective a low-cost WiFi extender can be in improving coverage. Following up on testing done in 2020, we recently evaluated seven popular models from Linksys, Netgear, and TP-Link, companies that also make some of the highest-scoring routers in our ratings (available to CR members). The prices ranged from $20 to more than $200, which is a bigger gap than the last time we looked at these devices.

What did we learn?

While WiFi extenders can increase the range of your wireless network, their effectiveness is limited by a host of factors, including the speed of the internet connection coming into your home, the distance from your router, the areas in your home in need of WiFi coverage, and the WiFi demands of your family.

Here’s a closer look at our findings.

How Does a WiFi Extender Work?

While it’s tempting to think of a WiFi range extender as a device that can beam fast, reliable WiFi throughout your home, it’s more like a spot-fix for the dead zone in your bedroom or attic-turned-home office.

To get the best results, you have to plug the extender into a power outlet midway between your router and the dead-zone area. The extender can then pick up the WiFi signal from your router and push it deeper into your home.

But you’re likely to notice a significant drop in throughput speeds in the “extended” network. That’s in part because an extender relies on the same frequency band as the router itself. 

“In the radio frequency world, they’re called repeaters, but in WiFi they’re called extenders,” says Henry Parra, who leads CR’s testing for smartphones and wireless routers. “They repeat the signal on the same frequency to extend coverage.”

Because the signal is now going through an intermediate step, the speed—or throughput—is cut in half.

For example, if you’re standing right next to your WiFi router (where the signal is strongest) and get 50 megabits per second (fast enough to stream two 4K Netflix videos at once), the speed in your extended network will be about 25 megabits per second. And that’s in an ideal world, where the WiFi signal from the router hasn’t been degraded by obstacles such as thick walls and large appliances.

By contrast, mesh routers use two different frequency bands, which limits the speed loss to roughly 10 percent. They also allow you to move the individual units around your home, steering a WiFi signal around obstacles.

Should You Try Using a WiFi Extender?

To answer that question, we put seven models to the test in our labs just outside New York City.

Four of the models are compatible with WiFi 6, while three use the older WiFi 5 standard. WiFi 6 is a little faster than WiFi 5, as we first explained in 2019, but if you have a WiFi 5 router, it doesn’t matter which option you choose because you can only relay the signal in WiFi 5.

None of the models are compatible with WiFi 6E, which improves performance in dense environments like apartment buildings.

All of the extenders we tested use an app-based setup. That means you download a mobile app from the Apple or Android app store and follow the instructions to get the device up and running. According to Richard Fisco, who oversees all electronics testing for Consumer Reports, that’s an improvement from 2020, when extenders often used an older, less-reliable tech called WPS to assist with setup.

“Half of the extenders were a pain in the neck to get working with WPS,” he says. “Now you just use the app and it asks for your WiFi network name. Then you wait a bit and it connects to the extender.”

We used a professional wireless performance software suite to test each model’s capabilities. It measures the throughput of the extender directly from a nearby computer. That gave us more precise data than if we were to rely on a web-based service such as Speedtest.net or Fast.com, because data was being transmitted directly between the extender and a computer, not over the internet, which can introduce latency. We did three “runs,” and then averaged the measurements to come up with our final throughput score.

In our labs, we placed the extender being tested inside a room down the hall and around the corner from the laptop used in the test. This was done to simulate a typical home environment, where you might have your router in one room and the extender in another. We then varied the distance between the laptop and the extender (from 8 to 20 to 35 to 55 feet) to measure the extender’s effectiveness at various distances. 

In practice, there’s a balance you want to strike when setting up an extender: The farther you place it from the router, the more you risk losing signal speed. But place it too close to the router and you may not be able to push the signal to the desired location. In the instructions included with the extenders, manufacturers recommend placing the unit about halfway between the router and the area you hope to reach.

So, to answer the question of whether or not you should get a WiFi extender, here’s what you need to know. If your goal is to get WiFi in that one dead zone in your home, a spot where you like to browse the web and check email, our testing shows that an inexpensive WiFi range extender like the $50 D-Link Eagle Pro AI AX1500 (A15) and maybe even the $20 TP-Link RE220 (AC750) can do just that.

If you’re hoping to do more demanding tasks in that spot, like stream high-res video or play video games, you need to spring for a higher-end model such as the $94 TP-Link RE605X. Our tests show that one like that can indeed provide you with a faster signal. Just keep in mind that once the price reaches $150 or more, you might as well consider a mesh router, which can create a broader, faster WiFi network throughout your home.