introduction

In my home, there were two routers: One was provided by ISP and the other was from a 3rd party. The 3rd party router was quite good, we set it to extender mode and it was good ever since.

Unfortunately, the 3rd party router died after ~10 years of service. Thus, I bought a pair of D-Link A15 WiFi extenders so that my family and I could use Wi-Fi anywhere in the house. However, ever since, I had had a really frustrating network problem where the connection constantly dropped. It would show that it was still connected but no packet could be sent or received.

Yesterday, when I was working, the connection dropped every minute or so and it drove me crazy. Thus, today, I decided to try to find a solution.

procedure

I reset the device by pushing the reset button at the back of the device. After waiting for awhile, I connected to M15-A291 WiFi network and then connected to 192.168.0.1 to configure it. I followed the web UI to configure extender mode settings. Once this was done and I connected back to the device, I did a ping test to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS):

[pojienie@fedora ~]$ ping -c 100 8.8.8.8
...
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=98 ttl=113 time=363 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=99 ttl=113 time=297 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=100 ttl=113 time=206 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 92 received, 8% packet loss, time 99312ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 10.356/229.566/478.165/110.455 ms

As you can see, within mere 100 seconds, there were 8 packet loss. This was simply unacceptable! Thus, I decided to fiddle with the settings and see if any of those settings could improve it.

a solution that worked for us

I fiddled with Extender setting but the result wasn’t improving much. At the end, my setting was:

On the left, select Settings -> extender

1. Disable Smart Connect
2. Disable Wi-Fi 5G (since my router only supported 2.4G anyway)
3. For 2.4G Security Mode, I selected WPA3-Personal
4. Finally, for 2.4G 802.11 Mode, I selected Mixed 802.11b/g/n (I chose this one because router used 802.11n)

However, I later attempted to change its IP (the one it would get from the DHCP server on the router it connected to) to a static one :192.168.2.2 (the DHCP was giving out 192.168.0.0/24 IPs). On the left, click on Settings -> Network, then click on Advanced and change the IP to 192.168.2.2 and gateway to 192.168.2.1. Somehow, after this change, it became extremely good:

[pojienie@fedora ~]$ ping -c 100 8.8.8.8
...
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=98 ttl=113 time=29.8 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=99 ttl=113 time=59.2 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=100 ttl=113 time=10.9 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 100 received, 0% packet loss, time 99157ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 9.507/26.674/221.621/29.375 ms

I had no idea why changing it to use static IP would result in such a massive improvement. Of course, after this change, I was no longer able to configure it on the browser since there was no routing table for it. (I meant, I could change it, but I wasn’t familiar with ip enough to change it, lol)

footnote

Note that I had tried pinging the router that M15 was connecting to and, surprisingly, there was absolutely no packet loss. You may think that this meant the connection between my computer to M15 wasn’t the problem but it was.

Also note that my PC’s WiFi somehow stopped working after changing it a few times. Thus, when you do it, you might want to manually disconnect and forget the WiFi whenever you change the settings.