Warning, clueless luddite alert.
Wife has been WFH for months and both daughters occasionally participate in online school / college classes. Simultaneous use crashes the home wifi and it’s my job, as the token bloke, to fix this. The router is downstairs and all office / classroom work occurs upstairs.
Our router is an EE Brightbox working off the master phone socket. We are well over a mile from the exchange and there’s no fibre option. The Brightbox works fine in the room but has poor longer range.
We tried, and still have, a BT Mini WiFi home hotspot 500 powerline kit. It’s pretty unstable, with the Wifi signal dipping in and out. Each unit has it’s own SSID? and password as well, requiring different logins depending on where we are in the house.
We also have a TP Link Archer C7 AC1750 router that I was going to setup in place of the EE Bright Box but configuring this as a Brightbox clone defeats me. Not sure how the TP Link would work without the Brighbox as it is an EE product and has a built in modem.
The Brightbox, BT extenders and TP Link Router all have Ethernet sockets but I don’t currently have the cable to hard wire them together.
I was thinking that the simplest option may be to keep the Brightbox as the principal modem / router, connect via ethernet to the downstairs BT extender, then connect the upstairs BT extender by ethernet directly to my wife’s laptop. That’s going to mean setting up her work laptop to an ethernet source? Also connect the upstairs BT extender by ethernet to the TP Link router and wifi to the kids devices from that? That’s going to mean different upstairs / downstairs wifi SSIDs and passwords.
Any other configuration that may work?
Alternatively, bin everything and go mesh? Would that give me a single network / SSID / Login / Password through the whole house?
Thanks in advance.