Just some clarification

[KiddCold]

Our home is the average size but we do have the router in an odd position which means one side of the house is favored for WiFi. I had originally planned on getting a second router and using it as an access point.

In my quest for information on how to do this process I came across tons of information some of which really caught my attention.

I was told that if Router 1 is connected to the modem and Router 2 is connected to router 1 VIA Lan to Wan
............................^*Lan-------------------------------------------^*Wan

and I change settings accordingly I can create a sub-network to help with congestion.

To be clear this means that if I have a couple family members who watch Netflix all day and bog the connection down for the rest of us. If I put them on say router 2 they will not bog down the connection for those on router 1? Correct?!?


Sorry if this has been asked or explained already. I attempted to find the answer but could not find it in layman's terms.

 

[john-b691]

nope it is not the router they are bogging down it is your ISP connection and you only have 1 of those no matter how many routers you buy.

In most cases there is no advantage to second router up lan-wan. If it can run AP mode then you save a lan port doing it but if its like many routers you hook them up lan-lan and disable DHCP on the second router. Yes you get a second subnet doing lan-wan but that just makes things harder to manage so you should not do it unless you have a good reason.

Maybe in past years the routers could not handle the load but now days the routers have more than enough capacity to run the lan ports at gig speeds. The bottleneck is always the ISP.

You want your second router on a different wireless channel. This will prevent radio interference but it will likely make little difference on your internet surfing. It would mostly be if you did things like run traffic machine to machine in your house.

If you were actually overloading the router you could set a second SSID so you could manually control which router which machine used but I suspect it will be easier to just use the same SSID.