Chaining Multiple Routers To Extend Wifi?

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leoweisman

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Feb 24, 2013
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Recently I decided to upgrade my router at home, due to my old router's terrible wifi range (anything outside of the room the router was in was barely enough to check email, forget about YouTube or online gaming). The new router works great for the most part, but the wifi doesn't reach all the way to the back of my house. I do, however, have an ethernet line that does reach. I'm wondering if it would be possible to extend the range of my wifi by connecting the modem to the newer router (like it is now), and connecting the long ethernet cable from one of the new router's outputs to the input of the older router. If this is possible, but somehow more complicated than I am envisioning, I would love help setting it up. Thank you!

Newer Router: NETGEAR N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router

Older Router: Some sort of old D-Link 2.4Ghz wireless router (I don't know the exact model).
 
Solution
getochkn
Yup. I do this for my house.

On the old router, you have to connect it to a PC to configure it first without it being hooked into the rest of your network yet.

- direct connect a PC to the old router.
- login to the old router turn off DHCP, assign it an IP address in the range of your IP's from your main router, but not something with conflict.
IE: In my house my main router is 192.168.1.1, my second router .2 .3 .4 .5, etc for the other routers. SInce the DHCP starts to serve out IP's starting at 100, 101, 102, etc for all the connected devices, it won't conflict and it makes it easy to login to the router if you need to.
- Now, setup your wireless info like SSID, channel etc. Try and space your channels apart, so if you new...
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getochkn

getochkn

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Jul 2, 2006
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Yup. I do this for my house.

On the old router, you have to connect it to a PC to configure it first without it being hooked into the rest of your network yet.

- direct connect a PC to the old router.
- login to the old router turn off DHCP, assign it an IP address in the range of your IP's from your main router, but not something with conflict.
IE: In my house my main router is 192.168.1.1, my second router .2 .3 .4 .5, etc for the other routers. SInce the DHCP starts to serve out IP's starting at 100, 101, 102, etc for all the connected devices, it won't conflict and it makes it easy to login to the router if you need to.
- Now, setup your wireless info like SSID, channel etc. Try and space your channels apart, so if you new router is on channel 1 or 3, set this one to 13 or 16, so they are far apart on the spectrum.
*You CAN set it to the be same SSID and use the same WPA/AES password key on them and get your device to seemly stay connected all the time. This only works if router 1 is out of range of where you go so it's force to try to reconnect, then reconnects to the 2nd router with the same name. If router 1 is too strong and you get a weak signal, it make stay connected to that router and not switch to router 2. If this is the case, then give the 2nd router a different name and you may have to manually switch your connection from time to time if it's hanging on to connection 1.
-Save the settings and reboot. You probably won't be able to login to the router now, as it has a manual IP and no DHCP server. That's fine. Let it sit long enough that you think the settings are saved, then move it to the new room, plug it into the ethernet cable into one of the LAN ports, and then you should be good.
 
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leoweisman

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Feb 24, 2013
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Thank you. I will go attempt this shortly, but I am pretty much a complete novice at dealing with networking stuff like this. When you say direct connect the router to my PC, should I be using the input port on the router or one of the 4 output ports?

Thanks again!
 
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leoweisman

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Feb 24, 2013
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So I finally got around to trying this out but I literally know nothing about routers or networking or anything. I'd really appreciate it if someone could repeat the instructions as if they were talking to a complete idiot :)

Thanks!
 
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