Use your old router to extend your wireless signal across your house

This is fairly simple to do, takes about 10 minutes. You need the following : -

Current wireless router (already set and working)

Old wireless router

Ethernet cable

1 - Place your old router into the spot where you would like it, connect the power and connect the ethernet cable from your old router to your current router (I drilled a hole in my wall, and placed my old router on the other side of the wall).

2 - Once you’ve decided on a location for the router, power it on and run a cable from your Laptop or PC to one of the spare LAN ports on the back of the old router. Now you need to login to the old router – refer to your manual to do so if you are having issues. Most routers are configured using a local IP of either 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. Type the old routers IP address into your Internet browser and then login to it using your username and password. By default, most ship with the factory default username of “admin” and a blank password.

3 - Now that we’ve logged into your old router, we are ready to begin changing the required settings. First up you need to disable the DHCP server, as you can see in the screenshot below. It does not matter if the DHCP server on the main router is enabled or disabled – if you want the main router to automatically assign IPs for your wireless devices on the first floor (or in range of the main router) so that you don’t need to configure them manually, then enable it.

4 - This is where things start to become a little more difficult. Now you need to find out what IP your main router is using and to do this you’ll need to login to that router and write it down. Our D-Link main router is using the IP address of 192.168.0.1, so we set the IP address of the old router to 192.168.0.2 – this is an important step, so that both routers can talk to each other without any conflicts. Also ensure that the subnet mask on both routers is the same – as you can see from the screenshot above, both routers we used were set to the subnet of 255.255.255.0, which is the default setting.

Okay, now that your old router has its own unique IP address and you’ve disabled DHCP, we need to change some more settings...

5 - Next up you need to disable UPnP on the old router – this option can usually be found under the admin section or advanced settings in most common routers.

6 - Now let’s configure the all important wireless settings of the old router. We set the WRT54G to the wireless mode of “G-Only”, as this mode provides the best performance. If you set any router to mixed mode, they usually see at least a slight drop in performance, as they need to negotiate between the two modes.

7 - Next up we setup the SSID (or wireless network name) and we changed the name to “oldrouter” so that it is easy to identify when selecting a network from the list – it doesn’t matter if you enable SSID broadcasting or not. It just means that if it is disabled, it will be hidden, and you’ll need to manually enter in the wireless connection details on your PC or network device.

8 - Now that the old router is fully setup and ready to go, run the Ethernet cable from a spare LAN port on the main router (or via a power line device) and plug the other end into one of the spare LAN ports (don’t plug into the WAN port, as it will not work) on the back of the old router and then we are ready to move onto setting up the devices connecting to the old router.

9 - Let’s now try connecting to the old router that you’ve just finished setting up. Depending on where you are in your house or office, you should see at least two wireless networks that you are able to connect to, just like you can see in the screenshot above. Connect to the newly created wireless network, in our case it’s called “oldrouter”. Once you first connect, nothing will happen and it will assign you an IP address of something along the lines of 169.x.x.x. You won’t be able to access the LAN or Internet yet, but don’t worry – read on.

10 - What we need to do now is setup a manually configured LAN IP address, as you will remember, we disabled the DHCP server of the old router. Go to the properties of your network connection, click Properties, Internet Protocol Version 4 and then click Properties again. Now you need to select “Use the following IP address” and now you are able to enter in your manually selected IP address.

Previously in this guide you set a local IP address for your old router, we used 192.168.0.2. If this is the first device connecting to the old router, you should use an IP address of anything above that such as 192.168.0.3. Other devices wanting to connect should use 192.168.0.4, 192.168.0.5 and so on. The last number cannot go above 256 OR wherever the DHCP IP range on the main router begins at. Our D-Link router begins its DHCP IP range at 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.199, so don’t select an IP in the range between 100 and 199, to avoid conflicts with other networked devices. Set the subnet mask as 255.255.255.0, although it should do that for you automatically, once you’ve entered in the IP.

11 - Finally, we need to enter in the default gateway and this is the IP address that provides us with the lovely Internet access, in other words, the main router which has your modem connected to it. Here you should enter in the IP address of the main router and in our case it is 192.168.0.1. Also set the preferred DNS server to the same IP as your main router. Apply these settings and wait a few seconds for the network to initialize and then you should be connected and ready to go.

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