How to Convert an Old Router Into a WiFi Extender / Repeater

when it comes to Wi-Fi obviously one of the most annoying things is having a bad signal because then the connection drops out or it's so slow that it's unusable so in this video I'm gonna show you how you can turn any old router that you have lying around into a way to extend your current wireless network in your house apartment whatever and one thing to keep in mind is the way this will work is it will create a separate wireless access point that you'll connect to you separately from the original access point so basically if you move to the part of the house that does have a very weak signal from your regular router you'll have to separately connect to the extended one to get the better signal it's not like a so-called mesh network where your phone or device will automatically switch between access points that will take a special type of router a mesh router that you'll probably have to buy separately but this is still a better option if you don't have any connection and one side of the house you'll at least be able to switch to it pretty easily yourself when you do want that better connection so that's how it's gonna work now you're gonna have two main options for how you want to approach this you can either set your router as a wireless repeater if that feature is available in your router which is basically means it's going to be all wireless so your new access point extender will need to get the wireless signal from the original one and then it will basically relay that to whatever else is connected to the extender the other approach which is definitely ideal is to use it as a wired extender in which case you run a actual physical hardwired Ethernet cable from your main router to the extender router and then it will broadcast as an access point from there and the reason this is ideal is pretty obvious I would think is you're getting a hardwired full connection speed to the extender router and then it's broadcasting at the full bandwidth to connect to the rest of the network whereas if you're using a repeater then there's two steps where there could be potential signal loss from the main router to the extender there's some signal loss and then also to the device to the extender there's also going to be some loss so you also have to keep in mind if you're going to be doing a repeater where you place the repeater because if you put it all the way on the other side of the house where you're already getting a weak signal it's gonna have to try and amplify a much weaker signal whereas if you put it in the middle of the house where say you have a 50% signal from the main router well then it'll extend it and you'll probably get maybe enough to reach the opposite end of the house but you can't just put them super far away if it's a repeater it still has to be within enough range to get a decent signal from the main one so first let's take a look at how to set up your old router would you gonna be the new access point in repeater mode and obviously the advantage of this is it's a lot easier to set up if you don't have the ability to run a hardwire from one part of the house where the old router is or the current router to your extender well then you'll have to use a repeater one thing to keep in mind though is not every single router may have the ability for it to act in repeater mode it might have to be wired extender mode which I'll explain next so what you should probably do is Google the model number of your router and then wireless repeater mode or something like that and see if it has that feature now the router I'm going to be using in the example in these videos is the Linksys wrt54g stratus do so I'll walk you through that it as an example here so basically in the Linksys settings you go to the connectivity menu then internet settings and in this drop-down you can see you can change it for the two select wireless repeater and then what you do is you enter the SSID or the Wi-Fi name of the network you'll be extending so this is incoming from your main network and then you type in the type of security the password whatever and then this router is going to be getting all the signal from the old one and then relaying it to and from whatever devices you connect to this new access point and you can see you'll have to create a new name for this new access point because it will be connected to separately but even though it's a separate access point it'll still be connecting to the same overall network in your house and still be connecting to all your other devices as a network and again the placement of this new access point is definitely going to be critical because you have to have a balance between where the main router is and this one and where you're trying to extend it to so like I said before you can't just put on the complete opposite side of the house where you're not getting a signal with any device and expect this just magically amplify the signal it can't do that so you might have to put it say in the middle of the house and then it will be able to extend a still lower signal to the very end of the house but still better than nothing and fortunately with this setting it's pretty much all set up for you there's not much more to change you could change the local IP of this extender so you can know how to configure it and access it via the web GUI later if you want but other than that it should be pretty much set and forget it now the next option is to use it as a wired extender so it'll basically be the same thing where you'll create a new access point and you'll connect to this access point separately but this time this new access point is actually wired to the main router now ideally if your apartment or house is already wired with Ethernet throughout the whole house in every room you could literally put this extender anywhere and get a perfect signal no matter where you want in the house you could even set up like multiple of these wireless extenders if you really wanted to now if you do not have a Ethernet cabling in your house you do still have a couple options for how you could hardwire it so I already made a video about this kind of topic talking about some options such as mocha and powerline these are two technologies that allow you to actually convert a coaxial like cable wiring to Ethernet and that's mocha and for powerline you have the ability to actually send the ethernet signal over the power circuits like through the plugs in your wall so I'll put that link popping up here that is an option if you really want to have a wired extender but you don't have your whole house wired Ethernet definitely check that video out in any case if you decide you want to do a wired extender pretty much every router will be able to do this one way or another in some routers you may be fortunate and you'll have a feature called bridge mode actually most routers probably should have this and this again makes it very easy it pretty much eliminates most of the router settings and just makes it more bare-bones so you can see again in this Linksys router you change it to bridge mode it pretty much eliminates most of the extra features that are not necessary in this case like the firewall or DHCP assigning IP addresses it doesn't need to do any of that because the main router is still going to be handling all the networking this is literally just going to relay the signal via hardwire and basically just being an access point things connect to it the signal gets sent to the main router where it's all handled now if your router for some reason does not have an actual bridge mode you could just disable DHCP so it doesn't assign IP addresses to other devices and that should pretty much do the same thing you might have to like disable the firewall because the firewall will still be on the main router if you're doing it that way you'll probably also have to change the IP address of the router so it doesn't conflict with the main one but you probably don't have to worry about that again if you don't have a router that has anything to do with bridge mode you search online there's no bridge mode whatever then if you don't know how to work with computers to well you might honestly be better off just buying a dedicated repeater device and not worrying about it because it might just be a hassle anyway but I still think for like 90% of you whatever routers you have will at least be able to do wired extender mode it might even have a wireless repeater mode and it like you saw it really is not that much to setup you pretty much just change a setting you set the name of the wireless SSID that's outgoing you set a password for it you connect to it the same way you would a router and it kind of just handles everything and you don't have to really configure anything new it's just basically a bridge so hopefully this video is helpful either way again I'll put a link to that video talking about mocha and powerline so you can get Ethernet cables even if your house isn't even hard wired with Ethernet you can just click on that link right there highly recommend it so thanks so much for watching guys and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 612,489

Keywords: technology, tech, old router, wifi extender, router wifi extender, wifi repeater, router wifi repeater, old router wifi repeater, wireless extender, router wireless extender

Id: LEGmVQlW6qY

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020