Networking noob looking for help cascading routers

[mthacker]

Hey SNB Community, First time poster here. Hope I'm in the right place.

I'm in the process of giving my girlfriend's home network an upgrade and could really use some advice. She lives in the basement of a 2 story rental house. Currently, the only internet connection for the entire house is a wireless router (Netgear WGR614v10) that is connected to the modem, located upstairs. I'm trying to improve the network in her basement unit by running a connection down to a new router, a TP-Link Archer C50, and then, from there, a wired connection into a switch in her room, where I hope to further improve the wifi signal using a Belkin N600 range extender. I've included a diagram, which I hope is helpful.

Right now I'm stuck. I've been using this wikihow article as a guide, but haven't been able to figure out how to configure "router mode" on the TP-Link router. On top of that, I'm not really sure which mode would be best. Setting it up LAN-LAN seems like the simple choice, but if I could set it up LAN-WAN we could block the upstairs neighbors from accessing the downstairs network and avoid potential interference.

I'm totally stuck and starting to feel like I'm bashing my head against a wall. I have some specific questions, but they all basically boil down to: how the hell do i do this!?

1. Am I using the right hardware? Is all this stuff compatible?

2. Which of these routers should be my primary, which one should be my secondary?

3. Should I use a LAN-LAN or LAN-WAN setup? Are there any good guides on how to do this?

4. I've had difficulty finding good information on how to get the routers to talk to each other. Can someone point me in the right direction to some resources that will show me how to get that done?

5. Is there anything else that I'm failing to consider that might give me trouble moving forward?

Big thanks in advance to anyone that helps!

 

[RogerSC]

Well, cascading routers is really not the term that's used, and it does help in searching the internet to use the correct terms. If you have two routers, for example, one would be your main router, and the other would be an access point (AP). You can, of course, have more than one AP, and in a sense they are cascaded, that's just not the terminology that's used. If you look on the internet (or on this site) for articles on how to configure a router as an AP, you'll see that you turn off DHCP on the AP, since you only want your main router assigning IP addresses. And you set the IP address of the AP to a different address than your main router is set to on the same subnet. So if your main router is set to 192.168.1.1, you could set your AP to IP address 192.168.1.2, or something like that. There's a couple of other minor changes that you can make to set up a router as an AP as well, some reading would help you.

Some routers have an AP mode, and that generally does most of the needed AP configuration (you still need to set the IP address of the AP) and also gives you one more port on the AP. Using AP mode on a router, you can generally run a cable from a LAN port on the main router to the internet port on the AP. So the other 4 LAN ports on the AP are available for connecting client devices to.

Anyways, yes, you're on the right track. Not all wireless extenders can be connected with a cable, and it is better to connect AP's with a cable. If you use a simple wireless extender, it will usually cut the wireless speed in half. An AP or a wireless extender that can be connected via an ethernet cable won't do that, you should get close to the speed that an AP sees coming into it going out to it's clients.

 

[thiggins]

Since you're here, try a few of our articles.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/basi...best-way-to-get-whole-house-wireless-coverage

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-howto/24428-howtotwoprivlan

First thing is to make sure the two routers have different subnets. If one is 192.168.1.X, set the other to 192.168.10.X, for example.

It would help if you said specifically what is working and what isn't. Can you ping the upstairs router IP address from a wired client on the downstairs router?

 

[sm00thpapa]

Replace that Netgear 614 to start.