On the second floor of my house, I have a desktop imac with a Netgear N300 router attached to it. I have the lowest DSL speed from ATT, which bandwidthplace.com judges to be, at the moment, 1.12 Mbps download.

Downstairs, on the first floor, I use Facetime on an ipad to communicate with my brother, which works surprisingly well. But I'd like to increase the signal strength to reduce or eliminate slowdowns and drops. Do you think a range extender would allow me to do that? Or is there something else to take into account? Thanks for any relevant advice you can offer.

I use a powerline adapter/wi-fi extender that works quite well. Lots to choose from on Amazon. They use your home wiring to transmit the broadband signal to any room you plug in the adapters. Wi-fi or hard wired.

Although range extenders can be made to work properly, historically speaking, I've had very bad luck with them. They can be very ornery (to impossible) to set up initially, and I've seen them then randomly disassociate after days, weeks, or even months of working.

Possibly a better solution would be to install a second base station elsewhere with another ethernet run to it?

Not all WiFi routers will play nice with extenders, but I have used a WiFi network extender for years and the only difficulty is occasionally needing to reset the extender (power down and power back up) usually after some sort of a power glitch and that happens very seldom since I installed while home surge protection.

FWIW I am using an Airport Time Capsule to create the network and an Airport Express to extend it.

If my router is upstairs, and I want to watch YouTube through my TV downstairs, what DSL speed do you think I would need? And do you think I would need some kind of ranger extender/access point in between?

DSL speed is limited by the condition of the telephone companies copper wire network, the number of wire miles between your location and the Telephone company central office or DSL repeater/amplifier, and seldom if ever more than 5 or 6 Mbps. (Fiber Optic or Cable is capable of much higher speeds. Right now my cable broadband speed is running in the range of 60 Mbps). On the other hand my WiFi LAN is running 217 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz and 1,300 Mbps on the 5 GHz band. So either WiFi band is many times faster than your incoming DSL signal can be.

Before making any hard and fast recommendations you need to do some testing:

1. Go to an internet speed test site such as Ookla.com and measure your actual download speed (If the download speed is less than 3 Mbps talk to your DSL provider and ask them to try conditioning your line to improve signal speed or consider another network provider)
2. Get a WiFi app such as WiFi Explorer (available on the app store) and check your Wifi network speed, signal strength, and signal to noise ratio in the same room as your WiFi router
3. Using the same app either check your Wifi network speed, signal strength, and signal to noise ratio at the TV downstairs. If your router is dual band be sure and check both the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz bands. One may penetrate through the floor significantly better than the other and it may be all you need to do is change bands.

IF

• The internet download speed is significantly less than your WiFi network speed
• and TV reception of content coming over the network is adequate in the same room as your router
• and the WiFi signal strength downstairs is reasonable
• and the signal to noise ratio downstairs is not hugely higher than in the room with the router
• and you get a good picture on the downstair TV with no distracting screen artifacts

THEN

• You do NOT need a WiFi signal amplifier/extender

ELSE

• If the downstairs signal strength is low or the signal to noise ratio high

THEN

• You may benefit from a WiFi amplifier/extender

Just to clarify, my Verizon DSL speed is 7.8Mbps which translates to about 820Kbps by the time it gets to my deuced Mac(hina) via my AirPort Express Base Station.

ookla.com doesn't work.

WiFi Explorer is incompatible with my system.

Try Speakeasy Speed Test - Powered by MegaPath.

I also use Speedtest.net by Ookla; I wonder if it will work for you where ookla.com didn't.

Both require Flash.

Edit: In place of WiFi Explorer try KisMAC for Mac; I'm pretty sure it's the one I've used successfully in Snowy.

Speakeasy and Speedtest require Flash, which I deleted a long time ago.

For Kismac, Macupdate didn't work, but I found it here: http://www.tucows.com/preview/607729/KisMac

I'm paying $42.00 for ATT lowest speed DSL

What is that download speed? In my neighborhood AT&T's slowest—768 Kps (yes, K not M, so really slow)—is $29/month.

1.12 Mbps