added a second wireless router to a wired BT Broadband Connection

[martinbjackson]

Hi All

We have recently renovated our house and the electrician has put a switch into our loft which allows us to have wired / ethernet access throughout our house / home office (running off our BT Broadband Hub 5 Type A)

However, our wireless signal does not reach to the back of the house and garden and we would like to add an additional wired hub or router that will allow us to create and access an additional wireless signal.

Has anyone done this? My business partner bought the attached device last week

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/5059609.htm

but it doesn't allow us to connect as an ethernet wired device, only wireless to the original router (which is not what we're looking to do)

Has anyone else attempted to do this? If so, can anyone recommend a suitable device? We've done all sorts of google searching and can't find a solution anywhere!

[spank]

Hi there,

That device will connect to the wifi of your existing router and allow users to connect through it.  It appears to boost the signal but it depends on the signal between it and the router, which might be weak anyway.

You can connect any router to any of your ethernet ports but will require a small configuration change.

At the moment you have a router connected to the internet which is acting as a gateway.  A gateway is responsible for handing out IP addresses to connected devices like PC's/phones etc and there can be only one per network.

If you connect a second router, it will also try and act as a gateway and give out IP's which will conflict and cause your network to stop working.

So the second router needs to have it's gateway features disabled.

First thing to do it configure the second router to have a different IP from everything else on the network., but within the same range as the first router.

For example, if the first router's IP was 192.168.1.254 then manually set the second router to 192.168.1.253.  If you add a 3rd router then have it as 192.168.1.252 and so on.

After the IP has been set then disable the DHCP service, which is probably on the same page you used to change the IP.

That's it.  Fix an IP and disable DHCP.

You should now be able to connect to either of the wifi's and get internet.

Thanks

[martinbjackson]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion but we are still have difficulty with this.

We are trying to add a second router (a BT Home Hub 3) and cannot see how to change the IP address on the BT Home Hub 3. We assume we can only fix the IP address for the additional router from the BT Business Hub itself?

However, when we go into the BT Business Router we do not see the BT Home Hub 3 router on our Business Network?! So therefore cannot fix the IP address there either.

This is despite the fact that the additional Hub is working as it IS firing out a wireless signal. However, it conflicts when in the range of the 2 routers when using non-mobile devices set up with ethernet connections (I presume since the 2 signals have the same IP address?). When using mobile devices we can connect to the 2nd router but cannot use Internet as connections prompts you to change the Home Hub settings!

Can you help us understand where exactly we should be aiming to change the IP address and DHCP settings (on the 2nd router or the main business hub router?)