The idea i had was if you place it at the edge you get a weaker signal to repeat. Instead, placing the repeater a third away (by signal strength) from the edge means higher throughput and possibly a more stable connection at the destination.
Err.. IINM,
you advocated placing the repeater 2/3rds away from the edge, i.e. very close to the main router. So the repeater had an excellent link to the main router, but any repeater clients were now at the edge of the repeater's signal. This is even worse than indicated in the pic, since there were 2 walls to the right of the repeater as well. What was the point?
The 2nd setup which is 1/3rd away from the main router's signal edge does look closer to the setup I was suggesting, so maybe after a year, we do agree after all
Of course he's getting full speed, wifi from the main router is around 20Mbs, a repeater will halve (this is how much is lost per repeater or hop) it to 10Mbs
One year on and still propagating a myth
Since you trust smallnetbuilder,
here's how they put it :-
"repeaters start out with a
minimum 50% throughput loss."
"If you're trying to work around the signal-sapping effects of stone or concrete walls, those obstructions will also kill the repeater's signal,
on top of the built-in 50% throughput reduction."
I say link speed router-repeater is more important than repeater-client in terms of throughput on the client. There was a good article on SNB that explained this subtle point but i cannot locate it.
From the same article on SNB :-
"best repeater placement will involve a lot of trial-and-error. Placing the repeater closer to the main wireless router will provide higher bandwidth for the repeater to retransmit. But the longer distance from the repeater will reduce the signal received at the target area and also the resulting throughput. Placing the repeater closer to the target area will provide a stronger signal there, but at the expense of even less received throughput to be repeated."
In other words, they are recommending balancing both router - repeater and repeater - client links like I had already suggested.