D-link Wi-fi Booster Or Wireless Repeater

By Author: Ki Grinsing
Total Articles: 82
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Are you experiencing a poor wireless signal within the house with your existing wireless network? Or are you demanding high performance range extender to support your home theater devices? D-Link offers you two types of devices you can use to extend your existing range coverage – a simple range extender DAP-1360 and the Wi-Fi booster DAP-1525. When do you need each of them?

Basically DAP-1360 range extender doesn’t compare with DAP-1525 Wi-Fi Booster. Firstly about the prices, you need to pay twice as much as DAP-1360 for DAP-1525. Secondly the performance, DAP-1525 is designed for HD media streaming but DAP-1360 is designed for standard wireless range extender. Let’s have a look more detail between the two products.

DAP-1360 Range Extender

DAP-1360 is a multi mode device you can configure as the wireless AP, or as the Wireless range extender (repeater), or as the wireless client. You can connect the DAP-1360 to your LAN network as the wireless AP to easily create a wireless N network. Or you can extend your existing wireless network for longer distance coverage by configuring the device as the wireless ...
... repeater. Or you can connect a single Ethernet-base device as the wireless client to your existing wireless network.

DAP-1360 is more popular when it works as the wireless repeater instead of other function modes. If you need to extend your existing wireless network to cover dead spots area, you can configure the device as the wireless repeater to let you roam from longer distance with the same network name (SSID). You don’t need to jump from one network to another when you walk around exploring the house with your mobile devices.

Can you use the DAP-1360 in repeater mode to stream HD media successfully? Probably you can but I don’t guarantee that you get a satisfied performance. You can stream HD media but you might experience lag and jitter performance. If that is the case, you may consider the DAP-1525 Wi-Fi booster. What this product does?

DAP-1525 Wi-Fi Booster

The DAP-1525 is designed for streaming High Definition media. You can extend the range of your existing wireless signal and get the smooth performance in streaming high definition media or gaming, lag-free and jitter-free. This is the beauty of this device, the ease of configuration. You just need to connect the DAP-1525 to your existing router and let the device does the rest of the configuration for you.

The DAP-1525 is powered by six elements of beam-forming antennas to automatically find and track individual wireless devices and focus beams of bandwidth to them to ensure seamless connection within the large home.

What makes it different with the DAP-1360 is that the DAP-1525 includes four gigabit Ethernet ports for high speed wired connection to your gigabit NIC-enable clients. Moreover, the device supports selectable dual band to let you select the best radio signal to meet your wireless clients. And another plus value with this DAP-1525 is that it includes one USB port with share-port technology to let you share an external storage or printer.

Both the DAP-1360 and the DAP-1525 are powered by the latest wireless N technology. It means you may use these products only if your existing router supports wireless N technology too for optimum data rate transfer. Why should you spend lots of bucks to extend the range of existing network which is still powered by legacy router? It will just create bottleneck at the router side, and you just waste the powerful device to work in its best performance. If this is the case, forget the range extender or Wi-Fi booster. What you really need is upgrading your legacy router with the latest N600 or N750 wireless router.

By Ki Grinsing – MCSE and CCNA engineer who manages the wireless networking router. Find other types of wifi range extender and other wireless and networking articles in his blog.