Amped Wireless High Power 600mW Compact Wi-Fi Range Extender (REC10)..
Special Price Amped Wireless High Power 600mW Compact Wi-Fi Range Extender (REC10) By Amped WirelessMost helpful customer reviews
135 of 135 people found the following review helpful.
Simple and effective
By M. Laird
We needed a boost to our wifi signal after moving our router to a new location. First we purchased a new 'long range' router that didn't improve anything for us. So we returned that, plugged our old router back in, bought this, plugged it in, walked through 5 mins of set ups...and poof... we have full strength signals in every single room of our 2400 sq ft house. Perfect answer and well worth the $!
105 of 108 people found the following review helpful.
Wow. I'm impressed
By Cliff Mason
I'm an IT Consultant who is constantly researching solutions for clients. This time I needed one for myself. I rarely write reviews, but I had to write this one.
I just moved into a hundred year old brick house. The router is in my office, which is in the upstairs corner. The solid plaster walls created a serious problem getting a signal on the first floor. I had tried a wireless extender in the past in my old house with lousy results.
I researched again, and decided on the Amped Wireless REC10 Extender, based on the reviews. I was blown away. It was fairly easy to set up with a nice web interface and wizard. I played around with it and reset it a couple of times using the reset button, until I understood the settings. I also had to move it around the house to several locations to find the optimal one, which just happened to be the front stairway, which had a power outlet. The signal to the router in my office was over 75% at it's final placement. I was concerned that it was too close to the router and wouldn't reach the rest of the house. I was wrong. Not only did it reach the kitchen perfectly, which previously had almost no signal, it also works in the basement!
The power of this unit is amazing. The reach is much farther than I could have predicted. I was expecting to have to buy an antenna extender, but the small antenna that comes with it was more than sufficient. If it's too much, you can even attenuate it. Try this unit. You won't be disappointed.
102 of 125 people found the following review helpful.
Not trivial, works in many situations, but not all, so make sure you understand what this does and what it does not do
By Trailman
Before you buy this device, make sure you understand its limitations and make sure that it will meet your needs.
In situations where a single access point cannot cover a large enough area, e.g. in a large office, a variety of technologies is available to extend the coverage, either wired or wirelessly.
Repeaters are one option where it is not possible to combine multiple access points to form a mesh network. The objective is obviously to create a single large network where the individual cells are transparent to the client, i.e. where the client will switch between access points without the user noticing a service interruption. This requires that all stations share the same SSID.
This is not what this device does. The Amped support staff calls the REC10 a repeater in forum posts, but I think that it is in fact not a repeater but a range extender, and these terms are not synonymous. The difference is not just semantical, because a range extender spans up its own network, i.e. you have a separate SSID, separate security settings, and as a result have multiple wireless networks. A mobile device that is moved between the coverage areas of those networks will not be able to seamlessly switch between them, but rather require user interaction. The REC10 tries to intelligently merge the IP address ranges of the home network and the extended network by providing its own DHCP server for wireless clients. This is configurable, but not very intuitive, because the settings for the DHCP client and server are lumped together and the details are not documented ("for advanced users"). I have not been able to get my desired configuration working. I would like the device to have a static IP in the home network and serve IP addresses to its DHCP clients from a separate range, or at least forward requests to my home network DHCP server. When I set DHCP to "server" and configured the IP addresses accordingly, it did not work. "Auto" works, but then the device has a dynamic IP address in my home network and I cannot create rules for it in the firewall.
Also, this appears to be causing problems with certain types of routers or other devices in your network. Read the Amped support forum for more details. There is apparently a known set of configurations that will not work. Comcast routers are mentioned repeatedly as unsupported. The fact that Amped has not published unsupported configurations is a frequent source of criticism.
That said, for many this might still suffice. I plan to use this device temporarily to provide better wireless service in the back yard and around the pool. It will not be plugged in unless I want to sit outside or we have guests.
Setting up the device was not as straight-forward as one would hope, but this was mostly my own fault. I have a schedule on the home WLAN that turns the kids' devices off after 9pm so that they sleep and don't surf or watch Netflix in bed. Because the REC10 obtained an IP address from my DHCP server that was not in the list of exceptions, it would not connect to the home network. It took a couple of hours to figure this out - the diagnostic features are limited. Once I gave it a static IP in my wireless network, I was able to add it to the list of devices that are allowed on my home WLAN without time restrictions.
A minor annoyance is the fact that the administration website (at [...] always wants to redirect to [...] even when you access it from the home network via its home network wireless IP (a static IP in my case). This can be convenient if I want to check or change the configuration from my desktop that is on a wired connection. When I browse to the IP address, the home page briefly appears, but then attempts to redirect me to [...] which of course does not work from the home network. I had to add it to my hosts file before I was able to use the web interface this way.
The biggest obstacle in configuring the device is that it reacts to sluggishly to changes. Some things appear to take forever until they become effective, and there was at times a discrepancy between what the web interface showed and what I observed. For example, when the web interface says that there is no connection to the home network, but I am verifyably connected to the REC10 and get fresh web pages served from the Internet, then this is not good.
One potentially attractive aspect of having a separate WLAN for me is the ability to separate clients based on time restrictions. If all the kids devices use the extended network and all my devices use the home network, I don't need to manage individual IP addresses anymore for the firewall rule and can just create a schedule for the REC10's IP address. But this will require that it remains online all the time, so I will have to weigh the pros and cons.
I cannot comment on performance and throughput yet, or if IPv6 is supported.
For reference, here is my network configuration that I can now confirm works with this device:
- Verizon FIOS service
- My router/firewall/WLAN access point is a Netgate M1n1wall running pfSense 2.0.3. It is connected directly to the FIOS feed. I do not use the Verizon router.
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