Just moved house and have the router upstairs in my office. Downstairs wifi is weak and iplayer is a bit flakey.

Just noticed there is wired Ethernet sockets in the upstairs office and downstairs. I can plug the router in on the LAN ports and have wired Ethernet downstairs.

Question is…., Is it possible to plug something in the downstairs ethernet port to create a local wifi spot?

Yes. Wireless Access Point.

“Yes. Wireless Access Point.”

Thanks – looks like I can get one in Argos for £25. I presume it would have a different ssid to the router and I’d need to change to the router wifi network if I went upstairs

Not necessarily. Some WAPs will allow you to use the same SSID. I’m not 100% certain how out do this mind you.

Yes my whole house is like this using 4x apple airport expresses all on the same ssid and password with auto channel selection in both 2.4 and 5ghz, they all create a wireless network being “fed” from the router via Ethernet. Apple bits are needlessly more expensive but it was effortless to set up! You move around the house and just hop from access point to access point without noticing it. Now if BT could just make rural broadband work…

You just set the same SSID (and password) in the WAP! Personally when I set up things like this I tend to manually select the channel to make sure they’re on different ones, but it’s really extremely simple, even with non-Apple kit.

Don’t you just need to configure the wireless device to connect automatically to the strongest signal? Even if you had the same SSID how would you know which one had the strongest signal?

The problem with this setup is that if it can still see both WAPs, then it won’t switch to the stronger one until it starts actually losing the signal.

There are settings you can tweak to make it roam more aggressively though.

E.g.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking/000005546.html

Doesn’t work well IME though, I frequently have to manually switch wifi on and off to get it to reconnect. Not a major issue but forget walking around listening to internet music streams etc on your phone.