Detection, on 17 February 2013 - 23:09, said:
Just set another router up as an AP, wire it to the dead part of the house if you have one, cheap and effective
Exactly! if you can not run wire from to the different parts of the house - then use the powerline adapters as mentioned already.
Sure you can use WDS, Repeaters, etc. that would make a wireless connection to your wireless from your gateway device. But not very good for wireless bandwidth - any sort of repeat of wireless signal will cut the wireless bandwidth.
As detection states - if you have wireless coverage issues, you cover those areas with other Access points and wire them to your lan. This is best overall solution for speed, stability and coverage. Use of wireless routers as AP is simple and easy and cost effective - most times wireless routers can be had for cheaper than any sort of repeater or extender or true accesspoint. And you normally get the added benefit of their lan ports that can be used to connect other wired devices in the area of poor wifi coverage.
Any and ALL wireless routers can be used as just AP, simple as disable their dhcp server and connect them to your lan via one of their lan ports. Setup their lan IP to be on your lan network, then access them via their gui and configure the wireless network. You can use the same SSID if you want, you could use different if you so desire - just makes possible issues in roaming. And set them up on different channels to prevent overlap with other AP or wireless networks in the area.
So for example if you had your main wireless router on channel 6, and 2 other APs I would prob run one on channel 1 and the other on channel 11 this gives you the 3 channels that do not overlap. All using the same SSID and PSK, this way your clients will auto roam to the one that is giving them the strongest signal. You can setup the roam features of your clients on the client so they will be aggressive in switching to different AP or less aggressive in switching, etc.