Quote:
Originally Posted by Nuckle
Can you explain in more detail? I'll need it in simpler terms lol.
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A repeater sits on your main wireless network more or less as another wireless device. It just plays the proverbial telephone game between your main access point and the wireless devices that are talking through it. The problem this introduces into your network are these:
1) Increased latency. Looking at the communication session of one wireless device. The wireless device sends a chunk of data to the repeater. The repeater then sends the data to your main AP and then it gets sent to where ever: your internal LAN, Internet, etc. Now with a single device, the increase in latency most likely isn't a big deal. Now add more devices on the other end of that repeater. Every one of those devices will need to wait their turn to transmit their data until the device that is currently talking to the repeater finishes. Now, this is just in one direction. When communications goes back the opposite way, you're dealing with the same issue. With what I discussed so far is only looking at the communications between the AP, repeater, and wireless devices associated to that repeater. Now add in other wireless devices that are associated to your main AP. Those devices are also fighting for air time to talk to your main AP as the repeater is also fighting for the same air time. You can see how this latency issue can get out of hand very quickly as many people have IOT devices in their home.
2) Speed degradation. When you insert a repeater, you divide your effective operating speed in half. Say you insert a repeater that supports 802.11n. And your effective speed to that repeater is say 144Mbps. What your max effective speed along the entire wireless path is going to be half of that at 72Mbps. Now tie this back to the above talking point about latency. Wireless currently is a half duplex technology; meaning only one wireless device can talk on the wireless network at any given time. Part of the reason why faster wireless technologies keep coming out isn't just for the sheer speed of transmitting data. It's to help in getting a wireless device to talk on the network and get off of it as quickly as possible to reduce over all network latency. This was an issue with wired networks back when Ethernet was first created. Ethernet devices were connected together via hubs. When switching hardware was created/introduced, this was the game changer in making Ethernet as successful as it is today and its ability to support the crazy fast speeds we see today.
Hope my explanation makes sense to you.