SOT: Home WiFi and Mesh system

Short answer: Yes.

long answer: its not a node most routers do 'automatically'

I have a POS Netgear whose ADSL got struck by lightning.... that acts as a bridge between Ethernet and wifi.

I forget how I made it work as a bridge rather than a router, but it looks like I turned off NAT, DHCP and DNS and gave it a fixed IP address.

And it sorta like WORKED

My other router-actings-as-a-wifi-point has a setting 'bridge' which disabled all the above automatically,.

Try it. It should work, or google your router type for exact instructions

Yes ...

turn off dhcp and wifi on the one that's got s***ty wifi, connect the two routers together using a cat5 cable between LAN ports on each of them.

if you can't turn off the wifi, set the SSID to "shitwifi" and set a password that even you don't know!

if you can't turn off dhcp, see if you can turn it off on the other one.

Yes, but you may find everything connecting to the better WiFi signal even when the good enough WiFi signal would have better bandwidth and latency.

Dave Barnes expressed precisely :

Thanks very much guys, appreciated.

You might also find that there is a build of OpenWRT[1] for one of them

- that will give you far more control than the stock firmware:

Many modem/routers are dual band ie. 2.4MHz and 5MHz. I was once told to switch off the higher band as they can cause interference to devices operating on the other band. I cannot see how but is there any truth to that?

Richard

Not in my experience. 5 GHz has the potential for hight speed, but not as good range compared with it's 2.4 GHz system. I happily use both.

Agreed 2.4 GHz goes through more walls and longer distances, 5 GHz is faster at short range (e.g. same or neighbouring rooms). Sometimes client devices are reluctant to roam between bands, unless you have a mesh setup (as per subject) where the AP can give clients a "kick" to move to other band, or other AP.

Also, the 5 GHz system puts the willies into the Specialist Thinkers of the world. Activates nanobots in the jabs don't you know.

I've no experience of mesh systems but have heard they're perfectly acceptable from a useability p.o.v.

I still try to cable everywhere I can though, nowt beats that!

exactly, including wired backhaul between mesh nodes some systems use 6 GHz for that.

On one router, no - both will co-exist ok. If you have multiple wifi points, it can get much harder to get multiple dual band setups playing nice. You can find collisions on the 5GHz band where the additional router can slow down 5Gz devices talking to the first one etc. That is where proper meshing ones are good since they take care of the more delicate configuration required (choosing non overlapping frequency ranges, setting power output to "just enough" etc).

Enabling band steering on the 2.4GHz routers can help - that prompts devices connecting to the 2.4 to rejoin the 5GHz if they have the capability.

Internal fibre perhaps?

Dave

you can't plug in a phone

My phone will latch on to the 5GHz signal when in the same room as the router, but will not fall back to the 2.4GHz band when I to the opposite side of a 2 foot thick stone wall where the 5GHz signal is almost non-existent.

Neither can I FWIW

Its an interesting possibility

Kit is available

Yes. Multiple wired APs which are cognisant of each other make better use of the radio bandwidth. They're not technically a mesh but they do the same job better. Needs APs which know how to do this, though.

I was putting in a 'trunk' so I put in a bit of multimode fibre just in case. They're very cheap:

Although 10G copper switch hardware is coming down in price so maybe the cat6a I also put in will come into its own sooner. Currently I have one bit of 10G copper hardware and some 40G NICs with QSFPs, so the use case is building...

Theo

Still "a cable" to an ignorant pig like me!