So here's my setup...
Upstairs in my north-eastern most room sits my cable modem and Airport Extreme. I thought I was having connection issues so I bought a second Airport Extreme and placed it in my bedroom which is downstairs in the south-western most room. Someone said that I should move the downstairs router to hardwire my home theater equipment which is downstairs also and right below the upstairs router. I'm thinking that the signal still has to travel via wifi to the upstairs router so what's the use. Am I right or should I hardwire to the AirPort Extreme downstairs and have the signal travel via wifi?
You shouldn't need to move anything in order to hard wire it unless the building requires it, but it would improve performance. Using an Airport Express or any device as a repeater makes a connection, but it's not a fast connection. Hard wire the Airport Express, set it up to Create a network, disable DHCP/NAT and do the firmware update. In fact, hard wire anything that can use the ethernet port, rather than using WiFi for everything. Many routers can only handle a small number of hand-held devices and Apple's network equipment is included. You might be interested in knowing that Apple has stopped developing network equipment.
Anything that streams media should be hard wired, IMO. If you want to see what's happening to the speed, use Speedtest.net from any locations where someone may use WiFi- it will be a real eye-opener. Having good signal strength doesn't equal good speed.
