DON'T Throw Away Your Old Router - WDS

have you ever been in a situation where your wi-fi doesn't reach far enough and you can't run a cable you could buy a repeater or another mesh node but those things cost money fortunately you actually might be in luck if you or a friend has an old router lying around like this one this is actually a new router but many modern wireless routers even cheaper ones have a feature called wireless distribution system or wds this essentially allows you to disable the features you're not using and deploy the router as a repeater with the added advantage of giving you access to the wired ethernet ports on the back those babies you can think of it kind of like running an ethernet cable but wirelessly so how do you set it up although there's usually a simple on off option for wds in your router settings it's wise to do a little bit of configuration work as well in order to ensure it works properly start by manually setting both your main wireless network and the secondary router to the same channel so they can communicate to keep the connection stable you'll want to give your secondary router a static internal ip address but how do you do that well on a home network every connected device is assigned a private ip address that typically starts with 192.168. this system ensures any incoming data is sent to the correct device usually your router assigns these addresses automatically through a system called dhcp but for wds you'll want to give your secondary router one ip address it hangs onto permanently instead of having your main router automatically give it a new one periodically which can cause connection problems log into your main router and find the place in the settings that will show you a list of all the connected clients then go back to your secondary router and give it an ip address in the lan settings that isn't currently being used by any of those devices make sure you start it with 192.168.0 or one depending on which one your network uses and using a fourth number that's between 1 and 255. you can also set the second router's static ip within the first router's dhcp settings by finding the second router's mac address and putting it in there after you do this go ahead and turn on wds you'll get a prompt asking which wireless network you want to connect to so pick the right one and punch in the password make sure by the way that you turn off the dhcp feature on the secondary router your primary router will handle assigning internal ip addresses and having two devices on the same network handling dhcp functions oh that can cause some pretty bizarre problems get flashbacks from here you're all set to use your secondary router if you're trying to connect a wired device just plug in the ethernet cable to one of the lan ports not the wan port the lan ports if you're trying to connect wirelessly instead punch in the credentials that your secondary router is using to connect directly to it although you can also give your secondary router the same login information as the primary one to have your wi-fi devices switch automatically between them but wait there's a big caveat with using wds because wi-fi is a half duplex protocol that can't send and receive at the same time wds tends to be slower than using a single router in fact if you're connected to the secondary router wirelessly your speeds will be roughly cut in half also keep in mind that you may not want to assign both routers the same login information as client devices tend to hang on to the first access point they can connect to for dear life so your phone for example may not switch back to the primary router the way you would like to once it's in range but while wds isn't perfect it's a great way to repurpose an old router if you don't need the highest possible speeds and can be a lifesaver if you have a wired only device you really need to use unless you don't mind tripping over the 100 foot ethernet cable you've snaked all through your house it's an aesthetic dystopian cyberpunk cables everywhere but if you're not into cables you might want to check out our sponsor corsair's hs70 pro wireless headset it features metal construction and a fully detachable uni-directional microphone you get up to 16 hours battery life adjustable on-ear memory foam ear cups and improved 40 foot range via low latency 2.4 gigahertz wireless it also features 7.1 surround via 50 millimeter neodymium speaker drivers ooh so learn more at the link below wow you watched the whole video thanks for that guys hey you know what else you can do like the video but if you didn't like it i dislike it this is so dumb check out our other videos comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow i'll be watching

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 878,800

Keywords: WDS, wi-fi, router, static ip, setup, dhcp, range extender, ethernet

Id: 9TI8fStHMjY

Length: 4min 40sec (280 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021