How to Connect 2 Routers on the Same WiFi Network

welcome back to dev odyssey a developer's journey through it where i cover tutorials and reviews of i.t tools and technologies i'm your host oris and today in this video we're going to be connecting a second router to your wi-fi network now you may be wondering why would you do that well if you have dead zones in your house where you don't have good wi-fi coverage this will help resolve that additionally if you want a mesh wi-fi system in order to help those dead zones out this can help you do that without paying the extra cost for a mesh wi-fi system and additionally if you need some more lan ports in your home this can help you accomplish that as well in this video i'll be using two different routers the primary router for this demonstration is a netgear ac1000 dual band router model number r6080 with 400 megabit lan ports and one 100 megabit wan port the second router for this video is a cisco linksys e 1200 also with four 100 megabit lan ports and one 100 megabit wan port the third and optional equipment for this video is a tp link power line adapter modelumber tlpa4010 and these ports are 500 megabits for each tp-link powerline device for this video you don't need to be using the same routers that i'm using you can use any two routers so long as you find the proper settings in your admin page if you can't find them easily i'd recommend googling the router name and the setting that you're looking for and it'll help you find it let's go ahead and get started before we begin we're going to check our secondary router for a specific feature that will make this much easier if your router has access point mode or bridge mode that will make it very simple to configure the router to set it up the way we need to what an access point is is it's basically a slimmed down version of a router where all it does is emit a wi-fi signal it acts like a switch or a wireless switch if you want to think of it that way where it gives us more connection available in this case via wi-fi instead of via lan ports as a normal switch does so we'll be checking for that and if you don't have access point mode or bridge point mode on your secondary router that's okay because we can manually shut off the router settings to make it act like an access point now to begin first we're going to be taking our old secondary router in this case mine is a cisco linksys e 1200 and we're going to be resetting it to factory settings so that we have a clean slate to start with you want to make sure the router is plugged in when you do this which i just did and then on the bottom here i have a reset button that i'm going to hold for five seconds so i held it down for five seconds and once that's done i'm going to plug in the ethernet cable into my computer just to make it easier to access the router interface next we're going to check the ip address that we're getting from the router in this case it's going to be somewhere in the range of 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.254 or 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254. these are very standard ip address ranges that you get from consumer grade networking equipment and in my case the default is 192.168.1.1 for my router however if you can't find yours go ahead and google your router name and standard ip address and you should be able to find it so once i make sure that i'm getting the ip address by dhcp i should be able to type into my web browser the ip address now that we have reset the router and we go to the default ip address of 192.168.1.1 we're redirected to a page here to install the cisco connect app this is to easily set up your router with a new wi-fi network in our case we don't want to be doing that since we want to bridge it and so we are going to continue with an open and unsecured network this is fine because we're going to secure it later in the admin settings click the confirm message and continue and then we get another warning that says the same thing about your router not being secure or your network as well and we go ahead and just click do not show me this message just so we can get it out of the way and so one thing i want to mention as well is you may have some ip address conflicts when trying to do this router setup what i recommend is disconnecting from your home wifi network and only connecting to this secondary router so that you can configure it without any ip address conflict so you can get in and change settings now once we're here we're going to set up a couple things first we're going to set up the wireless network name and password so that it matches the primary network name and password we want this to be set up the same so that we can easily move between wi-fi signals without a connection drop or having to re-put in the password or etc so we're going to go to wireless we're going to click manual here as we're going to be manually setting up the network we want to leave mixed mode on we're going to name this ssid or network name is demo wlan we're going to leave the channel width on auto and the channel on auto as well and then ssid broadcast we want to leave that enabled now you may want to play with these channel width settings later on to improve your performance but for now we're going to leave it as default we'll go ahead and click save and then we'll click ok and now we have saved our settings next we want to set up the wireless security in this case we wanted to match the main router wireless security as well so for security mode we're going to leave that as wpa2 personal as that's the most common configuration now but make sure it matches again what you have on your primary router passphrase here we're going to call it admin testing one two three four five and this is going to be the same password that we have on our primary router go ahead and click save settings and now we've finished the wireless part of this configuration we're going to go back to setup and now we're going to look at internet setup and we're going to click the drop down and change it to bridge mode and here what the bridge mode does is it allows us to get an ip address from the primary router and act as an access point for us and so we don't need to change anything else in here all we'll do is click on save settings and then we need to wait 80 seconds for this router to reboot and configure however now that i've set it into bridge mode it's not going to be accessible through a direct ethernet connection that i have now so i will need to connect it to the primary router in order for the secondary router to be seen and picked up and then we can make sure that it's seen in that router and then save that ip address for this router in particular now for us to continue we're going to connect to the primary router using an ethernet cable so that we're directly hardwired in now if you don't have an ethernet cable or you don't have a ethernet jack on your computer you can do this wirelessly but the difference is is you'll just need to connect to that wi-fi network with that name and password and it should be able to get in just fine so in my case the netgear router has the same primary ip address as the cisco one so once i click enter here we're taken to a netgear router setup my case this is setting up from scratch since i've not used it before but what we're going to do is set it up so that it has the same wi-fi name password and then make sure that the second router is being picked up by this first router if you already have your primary router set up you don't need to worry about it and you don't need to reset it up or reconfigure it we just need to make sure that we can log in and see that the secondary router is being picked up on so here i'm just going to click through some settings very quickly in order to get me to the admin page that i need to be at now that we're at this page we're just going to log in with our admin credentials and the one that we saved with our safari we'll click remember this password to make it easier now we log in and we're inside our router now that we have logged into the admin interface for the primary router we're going to go ahead and connect the two routers together using an ethernet cable but in this mode using access point mode or bridge mode we need to connect the secondary router or cisco linksys e1200 using its wan port to the primary router the netgear r6080 using one of its lan ports that is specific to this configuration and in a different configuration that we'll see later it needs to be connected slightly differently so now i'm going to go ahead and connect the lan port of the cisco router or the secondary router to the lan port of the netgear router now that we have that configuration set up we should see number of attached devices here is one we go ahead and click that and then we see our secondary router is this one right here while the first one is my actual machine so what we can do here is now set up a static ip address for this mac address or for this router so that no other machine that connects to this network gets that same ip address we want to be sure that it doesn't change to set up a static ip first we're going to go to advanced then we go to setup and then lan setup then at the bottom here you see address reservation we're going to click add and now we can click the radio button that corresponds to our secondary router which is the lower one here and we'll call this axis point now that we have that set up we just click add and there we have it now we have a static ip address for our secondary router and just if you're curious as well if you want to actually get a hold of the secondary router you could just go to that ip address that the primary router has defined it so this is 192.168.1.3 and you can see in here that we're able to access the secondary router the only things now you want to be sure about is that the wireless name and the password and the wireless security mode are the same between two routers so i'll go over that in this case just to show you but ideally before this you will already have checked on that so in this case we have two router bands we have 2.4 gigahertz band and we have a five gigahertz pan in this case we are going to name them all the same we're on wpa2 psk for both of these and then we will need a passphrase so here we will set that up as admin admin testing one two three four five click apply and then that should cover it now you notice that we have two bands in here in this case for our primary router if you want to disable one of these that's totally fine so that you only have a five gigahertz band i would recommend that since the 2.4 is slower but that's okay you can have them all be the same and it really doesn't matter you may have some interaction between them but because they're different bands they're using different channels and frequencies so they shouldn't actually have any interference now the next setup i'm going to show you is using a secondary router that doesn't have access point mode or bridge mode so now we've returned to the admin interface for the secondary router or the cisco linksys e1200 and we're starting off at the same default section except we've gone ahead and configured our wireless network to match that of the primary network so we have the same network name demo wlan we have the network mode mixed wireless security is wpa2 personal and then our passphrase is as follows here so back to the main setup section in this case we want to leave it as automatic configuration dhcp meaning it's looking for an ip address from your internet service provider we're basically going to ignore that and here we're going to set the ip address manually to be different so we're going to set this to be 192.168.1.2 we want it to be different because we don't want this ip address to match the ip address of the primary router because that way you won't be able to connect to either of them and there'll be a conflict we can leave the router name as is or you can name it something else i'll call it access point now the next thing here is dhcp server we want to disable this this is very important what this does is it tells this router to not assign ip addresses to your device meaning it's going to rely on the primary router to assign ip addresses now we have all those settings saved we're going to go ahead and click save settings and then you'll see here it's going to take 80 seconds to reboot next we're going to go ahead into the primary router and then we're going to set up static ip ranges so that no ip addresses can be given out in that certain range so that the devices don't conflict with the static ip address that we set on the secondary router now back in our primary router we're going to set the starting ip address to 192.168.1.10 and we're going to set the ending ip address to 192.168.1.254 and that's because we want to set the dot 1 the dot 10 range to not be assigned out this way we're sure that no devices on the network get assigned an ip address that conflicts with the secondary router in this netgear setup you can go ahead and find that in advanced setup and then lan setup here we have use router as dhcp server which we want in this case and then the starting range we're going to set to 10 and then the bottom will say the same 254. now if you have more devices that you want to have a static ip address then you could increase this number from 10 to 15 or 100 but it really doesn't matter so long as you leave enough space for your other devices that get handed out ip addresses using dhcp so most people do not have 254 devices on their network so you really don't need to worry about this too much now that i've set this to 10 we'll go ahead and click apply and let it update those settings there once we have done the update here and as we go through this we're going to connect the secondary router to the primary router using the lan ports on both routers because we're not using dhcp setup on the second router or more so we're not using bridge motor ap mode we have to connect them using the lan ports and that's how we get them to talk so we connect an ethernet cable to the lan port on the secondary router and then an ethernet cable to the lan port on the primary router and then this way we can ensure that they're able to talk you will not see these devices in the attached devices section because it is not getting handed an ip address from the primary router so the primary router is not going to see the secondary router in the same fashion as we did earlier but we can still communicate together with them and once this update is done i'll show you how we can do a test or a ping so i've opened up a terminal on my end and just to make sure that they could talk i'm going to do ping to 192.168.1.2 and you'll notice we're getting bytes back what this means is that it's able to talk to the secondary router additionally we can also reverse this test and plug in our ethernet cable to the secondary router and do the same ping as well and make sure that we get a response from 192.168.1.1 this is just good troubleshooting steps to make sure things are in good communication now once we've done this process we're basically done you can go ahead now and set up these routers and use them just the way you like now i mentioned earlier in the video that if you do not want to connect these two routers using a really long ethernet cable you can use power line adapters and in this case this is where you would do that setup so you would connect a power line adapter to a lan port on the primary router and then plug it into the wall then you would go to the other room plug the power line adapter into the wall and then plug the ethernet cable from that power line adapter to the secondary router then there is generally a button on these power powerline adapters you click it first on the one that's connected to the primary adapter then you click the button that's connected to the power line adapter on the secondary router and there you'll see the lights eventually will stop blinking and that means that they've connected and then you can have a better wi-fi coverage in your house by putting the secondary router in a different part of the house or a different room additionally if you want to do some more testing you can go ahead and look into using a program called ssider which will tell you different channels that are being used around the wi-fi networks in your area if you live in an apartment you'll be able to find this easily or if you live in a home you could pick up your neighbor's wi-fi signal so it'll tell you what channels are not occupied and you can then go ahead and change the channels of your wi-fi network on your primary and secondary router to a different number and that way when they match you have a better signal coverage in your house i'll show you that quickly here where you can find the channels and you can set this up on your own however i'm not going to go through ssid or in this video so if you do a wireless setup you'll notice here we have the channel set to auto we can choose here from one to 11 for the 2.4 gigahertz fan and the channel for the 5 gigahertz span we can choose 3640 all the way up to 161 in those increments and you'll know once you do the testing to see which one to choose and that about covers it for this part of the video in connecting the two routers together thanks again for following me on my journey i really appreciate it and i hope you got some value out of this video if you did go ahead and give it a thumbs up and if you like other content around it tools and technologies such as this go ahead and subscribe to my channel and click that bell for notifications so you don't miss the next one now would you guys set up two routers like this so you don't have to pay for a mesh wi-fi system or if you want to have better coverage in your house let me know in the comment section below and i'd be happy to talk to you about it thanks again guys and i'll see in the next video you

Channel: Dev Odyssey

Views: 55,698

Rating: 4.8140845 out of 5

Keywords: adding second wireless router to network, adding a second router to my home network, adding a second wifi router to a network, adding second router to network, how to connect two routers on one home network, how to connect two routers together, how to connect two routers together on the same network, how to connect two routers with cable, how to connect two routers with lan cable, router to router connection, router to router connection with cable, router to router setup

Id: WyUlzFO90KA

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021