Add WAP or Wireless Router to Existing Wired Network

[theweight99]

Hello,

Just looking for advice. A few months back I replaced my old Netgear RT-314 with the D-Link DGL-4100 (sporadic drops on the Netgear plus the D-Link is a Giga). I have not had 1 problem with the D-Link and like it a lot.

My son and wife have laptops with wireless built in and I'd like to add a WAP instead of having them be near a Cat5 cable or have a cable strewn across the floor.

I've read that it may be cheaper to get a wireless router and using a cross-over cable connect to the wired router. That should give me wireless and a couple more wired ports.

Any recommendations from the folks here who may have done something similar? To keep it simple, I'd probably want to stay with a D-Link. Should I be looking at a WAP or would a Wireless Router work just as well? Any advice on what particular WAP or Router has worked well with the 4100?

I've posted this on a D-Link forum but that forum seems to be rather quiet. This site probably gets more traffic and I thought I'd take a shot to see if someone here may have had a similar experience.

My son would be using his laptop mostly in the basement. My wife, one floor above.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[biviray]

Why use the wired router. Pick up a wireless router and use that instead or if you still need wired connections pick up a 4 port wirless router (if still available).

[Nelson37]

Ideally should have got a Gigabit wireless router, D-Link has one for under $100.00, I forget the model, 615 maybe? This could save you lots of headache.

Anyway, a wireless router can be added to the network, it is much cheaper than an access point for some strange reason. Don't need a crossover cable. You do need to set the router in "bridge mode", which varies dramatically per model and may require a different firmware like Tomato or some such.

[redwudz]

I assume you want to keep your wired gigabit router and not replace it with a gigabit wireless router, as that would be the easy way, though a bit pricey. You likely don't need a crossover cable as most routers do that automatically. I think you can just pick up a wireless router and plug a LAN cable from your existing router into the WAN input socket. I believe you need to set the wireless router as a Access Point. It's been quite a while since I've done this, so others may have better information.

Turn off DHCP on the second router or you will have conflicts. Make sure to give it a different address than your other router. IE, D-Link is probably 192.168.0.1, so you could make the new router 192.168.0.2 or 192.168.1.2, if it uses that configuration. I would stick with a D-Link wireless router as it may make things easier. You may have to ask D-Link or DL a couple of their wireless router manuals to see which models may work for you. This may be a real headache to set up.

I've got a DL-4100, but I just use the switch portion of it. I have a Netgear Gigabit wireless router and several switches hooked to it.

A second thought is to use the new Wireless router as your primary and use the DL 4100 as a switch between your wired computers. Unless you have a very fast internet connection, the gigabit won't have any effect on your upload/download speed, just the speed over your LAN between the other computers. The 4100 is easy to use as a switch, just hook LAN to LAN.

[theweight99]

Thanks for the replies.

biviray: Your suggestion is an option. I was hoping to save a couple of bucks tho.

Nelson37: Hindsight being 20-20, I should have picked up the wireless version of the 4100, as it was rated very good also. However, at the time we did not have laptops in the house and replacing a wired router with another wired router was simple. Also, Newegg was having a sale AND D-link had a 20.00 rebate so.....

redwudz - you are correct that I want to keep the wired router and not replace it. Also, I do like the giga part of the router as I'm getting some nice bursts of speed using Comcast. Don't really need the extra boost on the laptops but I use the main wired PC for work (VPN) and the router works very well. The Netgear would sometimes drop but again, it was many years old and served me very well.

Not sure how I missed this but I did some more Googling and came across some detailed information that Nelson37 and redwudz mentioned in their posts. In case someone else runs into this issue here is the link:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30338/98/

Now, I did not try this yet and will probably use a wireless D-link router (Linksys was used in the above example) but it does provide some good info. I'm going to poke around some more to see what D-link wireless router would best fit my need and budget. OfficeMax has a couple on sale this week including a rather cheap one:

D-LINK® Wireless 150 N-Router - 29.99 - regular 54.99

Certainly fits a budget but I want to be sure it's compatible first.

Thanks again everyone.

[svcdmaker]

I do this all the time. You can use any wireless router. You must turn off DHCP. Set the IP address of the new router so that it is not in the DHCP range of your original router. You do not need to configure anything for accessing the internet. Your original router will handle that. All that is left is to configure your security settings. Connect your new wireless router to your old router using any cat5 cable. On each device use one of the regular wired ports, you do not need to use the WAN ports.

Karl

[ron spencer]

I never knew this...nice posts

[stiltman]

Here's what i did with an old qwest wireless DSL router I had laying around
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic365991.html