Extending your wireless access point with a 2nd router
Posted on: Fri, 06/20/2008 - 8:15am
Stevie
Joined: 12-03-2006
Points: 1765
last seen 56 min 58 sec ago
Extending your wireless access point with a 2nd router
This may not be something you would actually want to do even if you had a spare router and you needed more range. I spent a few hours doing it last weekend and I finally got it to work beautifully. What I did was hook two LinkSys routers together using one network cable - each router is located on opposite ends of my house.
This doesn't seem like a big deal but wait: After the 2nd router is reconfigured, it allows a network where the two routers can have the same SSID (name) and both routers use the same security passkey.
Then a wireless device like a laptop can see both routers as one single entry in an "Available Wireless Networks" list. Once connected to one router, if the wireless device moves out of the range of the first wireless router and into the range of the other, it automatically and seamlessly hands the signal off. The user is unaware.
There are better ways to increase your range, like in buying proper hardware that was made for that purpose but this was pretty cool to do using the plain old standard LinkSys WRT wireless routers.
I wrote a description of the whole process <here>.
This may not be something you would actually want to do even if you had a spare router and you needed more range. I spent a few hours doing it last weekend and I finally got it to work beautifully. What I did was hook two LinkSys routers together using one network cable - each router is located on opposite ends of my house.
This doesn't seem like a big deal but wait: After the 2nd router is reconfigured, it allows a network where the two routers can have the same SSID (name) and both routers use the same security passkey.
Then a wireless device like a laptop can see both routers as one single entry in an "Available Wireless Networks" list. Once connected to one router, if the wireless device moves out of the range of the first wireless router and into the range of the other, it automatically and seamlessly hands the signal off. The user is unaware.
There are better ways to increase your range, like in buying proper hardware that was made for that purpose but this was pretty cool to do using the plain old standard LinkSys WRT wireless routers.
I wrote a description of the whole process <here>.