first time post if someone can guide me with my wifi router issue

[Jackson Long]

sorry for long post but wanted to give proper info.
Hi everyone, and thanks in advance for any time and advice I get.
I have a large but not spread out home in Hawaii. 4 stories with the garage on the top which would be I guess the 4th story or first. down stairs and out a little to the main area for living room, dining, tv, kitchen, lania.
then stairs that run the center of the home for the three floors. next floor are the bedrooms.4 bedrooms and lanais all the way around. down the stairs again to the bottom floor is an open game and tv room, play room for the kids.
so I have Cat 5e all over in each room and it all runs to the laundry room wall which I terminated and ran to a switch. just a dumb switch. plugged everything in and tested all wires and connections. all connections are good. all wall jacks I terminated personally and checked and all are good.
I have Time Warner Oceanic at 300 mbps speed. this is where it gets confusing for me. I have three Linksys wrt1900ac Wi-Fi routers. I go from the wall in the middle story and wall - modem - Linksys -Linksys Lan to wall - switch. everything is grand. I got great speeds in most of the home. front of home is pretty fast. up one floor, down one floor, pretty good. but I wanted to cascade to get better wifi in the back side of the rooms and house, even up to the garage would be nice to run to the gate. that is about 1.5 levels up from the top. So from my reading Cascading would be the ticket. keep the same name and passwords let it pass info and expand the Wi-Fi...but there is where I am at. I get everything to work right for about 1-2 hours then things start to fall apart. I even called Linksys and they walked me through it and said that's it your fine now. I am not fine now.
Can there be Cascading routers lan to lan with a switch in between? am I just stupid? I just cant get it. I spent all that time checking and terminating cables. yes I get connections from jacks but I wanted to also expand the Wi-Fi.
HELP

Jackson

 

[AdvHomeServer]

To me, Cascading Routers are routers each on a different subnet, one subordinate to the other in a chain. Hopefully, you don't have a variation of this.

Long is bad in posts, it makes it difficult to figure out the issues.

Generally speaking, you need a router where the ISP enters and wireless access point from there on. Everything is on the same subnet and it becomes an issue of getting the signal out to the users and how well the PC can float among wireless access points.

 

[RogerSC]

Not sure where you're trying to get with this? A simpler, more orthodox approach for this would be to plug each of the routers that you would like to get the effect of "cascading" with into the nearest wall ethernet jack, and set it up as a wireless access point (they would also provide wired connections, of course). Access Points (AP's) have their IP address on the same subnet as the "main" router, and each AP will deliver its full wireless speed, since they are connected via your in-wall wiring to the "main" router. You would give the each AP a "static" address outside of the DHCP address pool, but on the main router's subnet. For example, if your DHCP address pool is from 192.168.1.100 - 150, you might have your main router at 192.168.1.1, and your AP's at 192.1168.1.2 and 192.168.1.3.

I'm not sure if the WRT1900AC has an AP mode, I don't have mine in use right at the moment. But if it does, that would be perfect. You would connect the AP WRT1900AC WAN port to the wall jack, put it in AP mode, and set up it's IP address, and you'd be pretty much there.

If the WRT1900AC doesn't have an AP mode, then you would connect one of the LAN ports to the wall ethernet jack, and configure the router as an AP. This generally means turning off DHCP, but there is an article on this site on how to do this, and lots more sources on the internet.

I believe from what I'm reading that this will get you to where you want to be.

 

[chadster766]

The WRT1900AC support both Wired Bridge Mode (AP) and Wireless Repeater Mode.