Nowadays access to a reliable internet connection is critical for everyone. It becomes even more critical when you have a poor Wi-Fi signal and cannot avail proper internet. If the number of users are less, another Wi-Fi connection is not really a necessity, you can just use a spare router as a Wi-Fi extender to extend the range of the main router’s Wi-Fi.
This can easily solve the problem of poor Wi-Fi coverage. This article will tell you how to turn your extra router into a repeater to extend your Wi-Fi network.
- Connect the Spare Router to the Main Router
Get your spare router and connect it to the main internet router via an ethernet cable; connect one end of the cable to the ethernet port of the main router and another end to the WAN port of the spare router that you want to use as a repeater.
- Check the Configuration of the Main Router
Connect one end of another ethernet cable in the Main router and another end of that cable to your PC or computer to connect both to check the configuration settings of the main router.
Open Command prompt on the PC and type “ipconfig” command. When you press enter, you can see the default gateway IP address in the ethernet adapter section in command prompt at top. Note down gateway IP address, which is usually in 192.168.1.1 format or almost similar.
Now open the browser and type the gateway IP address that you’d noted earlier and click on enter. You will be prompted with login page. You are now required to enter a username and password. You can find this information stated under your main router. You can also get this information by entering your router model on the browser.
After this you will be navigated to the main router’s setup page. You’ll find several configuration settings there, you are not supposed to alter any of them. All you’re to do is go to wireless settings and note down all the wireless settings information such as network name(SSID), channel, security type etc of the main internet router.
- Factory Reset Your Old Router
Once you are done setting up all the necessary cables (In step 1) and have noted settings of main router (In step 2), reset your old router. To reset your old router, look for a small hole at the back of the router with the text “RESET” upon it. Take a small pin or a tiny pointy object, put it inside the hole and hold it for a bit. Release the pin when you see all the lights blinking on the router. Your router has now been reset.
- Change Configuration Settings
For the next step, you are required to change the configuration settings on your spare router. Open Command prompt on the PC and type the “ipconfig” command.
Now the same process as mentioned in step 2 to find the gateway IP address of the spare router and open the same in a browser. Log in as you did in step 2, it will take you to the setup page for the spare router. Here you are required to make changes to the configuration settings of the spare router to the configuration of the main router that you’d noted earlier.
The first thing you need to do is disable the DHCP server by unchecking it; ave changes by clicking on the save button below the page.
Now you need to change the default IP address of the router. 192.168.1.1 is the most common address used by routers. You can change this to any number between 1 to 254. Generally IP address 192.168.1.254 is preferred. Make sure to save the changes. It’ll take a few seconds for the IP address to get changed and for the browser page to refreshed. After refreshing you’ll be taken back to the login page.Log in again with username and password. Now you should be able to see the new IP address on the setup page.
- Change Wireless Settings
Click on the wireless option at the top of the page. Select the manual option, here you can change manual wireless settings, such as the network name(SSID), network mode, channel, security mode etc.
SSID is the name of a wireless network. You can use the same SSID that your main router is using so that your device does not need to reauthenticate this access point.
You can keep the channel on “auto” for it to automatically detect and apply that channel or you can change the channel number from 1 to 13 as based on main router details which you’d noted down earlier.
Change wireless security mode from “none” to “other given options”. Usually, users go for WPA2-personal. Add the password you want.
Save the changes and your wireless setup is good to go.
Hopefully, this article helped you learn how to reuse your old spare routers effectively as repeaters. All it’ll take are a few simple changes to the configuration settings and you’ll be on your way!
