Calling IT people....Re using old Router?

[DanSp]

Hi all... Bit of background for you.....
I am looking to replace my dads lounge entertainment setup with a media center PC. His house is a bit of a strange setup over 3 floors and so to get wifi up to the top floor his main router is bang in the middle of the house on the second floor.
Due to the thickness of the walls his lounge is a wifi blackspot.
I have just been and purchased a tp-link powerline kit thing which i can connect the media center to.

REAL QUESTION...
Is it possible to use an old router, wired into the powerline kit, to give us wifi in the lounge, but also to plug the media center into?
(Any kind of instructions/walkthroughs appreciated! :D )

[DarrenSV650S]

Yeah I use a powerline kit and a router to get a reliable wireless signal in the bedroom. (There are a lot of wifi signals in other flats that interfere with my main router's signal). I get about 16mb from the powerline kit and router set up

[DanSp]

How much setup did you have to do with the second router to get it to work, or was it plug and play?

[DarrenSV650S]

I just plugged the ethernet cable from the powerline in to one of the four ethernet ports of the router. No more set up than that. I'm sure you could also plug your media centre into one of the other router points

[Grant66]

Have a look at dd-wrt. Reprogrammed a couple of old routers, have WiFi throughout the house and to the right end of the garden. If you do it using this way you can walk around the house without dropping the signal.

How to posted here : https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=di6FU4HAPMT5PPyDgPAF&url=http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php%3Fp%3D871846&cd=1&ved=0CCcQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEp64-sCX4thrvik2vApzP2ldZstQ


Sent from a portable communication device.

[Skip]

I use DD-WRT on an old Netgear wireless access point to repeat the wireless signal wirelessly - it cannot use the same SSID so it uses 50% of the signal for transmit back to the main base unit but it works great and I didn't have to run any extra Ethernet cables or use a powerline adaptor :)

[timwilky]

I use DD-WRT on an old Netgear wireless access point to repeat the wireless signal wirelessly - it cannot use the same SSID so it uses 50% of the signal for transmit back to the main base unit but it works great and I didn't have to run any extra Ethernet cables or use a powerline adaptor :)

This is the problem with all wi-fi extenders.


I run 3 dual band wi-fi access points on different channels to ensure I have full coverage on each floor. But they are connected via the gigabit network round the house anyway.

My recommendation would be extend using a 500Mb powerline if you don't have a cat 5/6 routed and then install your second router as an access point. Far more efficient than attempting to extend wi-fi.

[Skip]

Agreed there Tim - but in my situation the wifi repeat was the best option for the garage - works fine streaming Netflix, YouTube etc.

[Bluepete]

I'd also like to extend our Wifi into the garden. We're on BT fibre and getting a solid 25gb download via their box.

I also have a Sky wifi box which is actually a D-Link unit.It's only a few years old.

Now, please remember that I think Wifi is some kind of magic and that my knowledge of computers was almost broken when I installed Linux on this HP Mini, can someone give me an easy "How to" to extend my Wifi using what I've already got to hand?

Pete ;)