Hello, friends! This week I am here to tell you about a product that has massively improved my technological life — the Netgear N300 WiFi Range Extender (EX2700), purchased here. Probably I shouldn’t kill the suspense by telling you it’s good in the first paragraph, but screw the rules, I have WiFi.

In this day and age I definitely feel very fortunate that I live in a populated area where good internet is not hard to come by. My family even got a new router from our provider in 2016 which fixed some WiFi problems we’d been having (the router we had was quite old). However, this past summer, I discovered an issue thanks to one fun little device.

This is my Nintendo Switch. I bought it in the summer, because I’d bought Splatoon 2 for my friend’s Switch, but decided I wanted to be able to play it at home and had the finances to make that happen. There was just one little problem. It had a very hard time picking up WiFi consistently. I could download games, extremely slowly, but Splatoon decreed that my connection wasn’t good enough for me to play online. I suspected that this was a problem with the distance between the Switch and our router, as when I brought my Switch to my friend’s small apartment I was able to easily connect to Splatoon’s servers. This was odd to me, as none of my other numerous devices were having internet issues. But I did some research and found that the Switch apparently just has a really shitty, weak WiFi receiver inside of it. Great!

So I scoured the internet, trying to figure out something to do, and stumbled upon the concept of a WiFi extender. I compared a few models, concerned about getting the most quality while spending no more than thirty or forty dollars. I’d rather only be able to use the Switch for offline games than spend a ton of money to make one device work better. That idea was just nuts to me!

I settled on this model from Netgear.

It had (has) four stars on Amazon after 25,000 reviews, so I figured it’d probably be fine for my uses. I don’t want to extend the WiFi to the moon, I just need it to reach a few extra feet so my Switch can function online just as well as my PS4 does.

Setting it up was very simple. I’m pretty tech savvy so it easy for me, but Netgear’s extender comes with an instruction book that is easy enough to understand that I’d say my far less technologically inclined mom could probably figure it out. I had it up and running probably within five to ten minutes, and it only took that long because the encryption on our router meant I had to fuss with Netgear’s website instead of just pushing the buttons on the side.

It lives unobtrusively in this corner, with my camera equipment. I need the room to be really dark when I sleep, and I was worried that the bright green lights on the extender were going to bother me even though it’s kind of tucked behind my dresser. I even turned it off at night initially! But it’s actually not bothersome at all.

I bought this extender for my Switch, but it’s actually improved the overall quality of my at home internet life! I’d never had any problems playing online with my PS3 or 4, but it sometimes did feel like downloading games or large patches took a really long time, way longer than I’d like. One day it occurred to me that I could swap them over to the extender’s connection, and it’s really made a big difference! Downloading games no longer takes a bajillion years! It’s great!

So, like I said at the top of this post, I definitely would really recommend this WiFi extender from Netgear. I’m not sponsored, obvs, because who would sponsor me? But I like this device so much that I wanted to let you guys know it existed!

I hope you’re all doing well.

–Krys