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Tony in Porterville, California listens on KTIP AM1450 - “Where Talk is Power” and asked: "We have a router in our house and we want to extend it outside so we can have Internet out there. The house is brick. I don't know what we need. I heard about the Orbi. I don't know. Can you give me some input?"

 

Tony, you’ll need some kind of an extender. An Orbi system would most likely do the job, just place the repeater unit somewhere closer to whatever area outside you want to extend your WiFi into.

Systems like Orbi are, unfortunately, not very cheap. If you need the one that comes with the main station and only one repeater, you’re looking at about $250 MSRP, but you can probably find it for less than $200 online.

Google WiFi should also work well for what you need, it’s a similar system, but it will cost you around $300 for a 3-base system. Another option would be an Eero system, but it will cost you $300 for a system with 2 devices, or $400 for 3 devices.

If all you need is a single repeater, you can usually just buy one for much less, but it may also be less intuitive to use. With a mesh system like the Orbi, Eero or Google WiFi, you’re just connected to your WiFi and that’s it, with repeaters, sometimes you have to work with multiple WiFi networks and you may have to manually connect to the one with the best signal. 

Repeaters don’t always play nice with devices from other brands either, so while this solution will be less expensive (some models are as cheap as $20, most cost between that and $100), it will probably require a little more work on your part.

 

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