Part of my house gets little to no wi-fi and I want to get that covered properly. So, I have an Asus AX-86U router and was thinking about getting a newer BE one and making the old one the AP/mesh/whatever. I’m going to run a cable to the bad part of the house and I also want to be able to use the old router like a switch (it’ll be by the TV and consoles). What’s the best way to set that up?
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Most routers will have an “extender” or “AP” mode, main thing is to disable the DHCP server on one of them, but keep the same wifi name and password for both and it should work OK.
I guess for the secondary device, I would also set it to a static IP address, let me know if you need help with that.
Okay, that’s all stuff I’ve done before. I’ve just never setup a multi-router config before so I wanted to check that there wasn’t anything I was missing.
There’s absolutely zero point in buying a Wifi 7/BE router unless you’re specifically buying a tri-band one. If it doesn’t support 6GHz out of the box, don’t buy it. I think the cheapest tri-band option on the market rn is one of Ubiquiti’s UniFi APs.
Others have explained that mesh mode is basically just disabling DHCP on the downstream router and using the same SSID and password.
Truthfully, the most important thing you can do is wire everything stationary to Ethernet.
The only objects on my wifi network are phones, laptops, a tablet, and some ESP8266s and ESP32s doing smart home automation stuff through Home Assistant.
I have a Wifi 7 BE19000 and its not for the wifi. It’s for the 10gig wan and 10gig lan ports.
I wish I could afford anything with 10gig lan. Even the switches are too pricy. Shit, the only internet I can afford is like 50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up.
My place doesn’t have ethernet in the walls, and I can’t even add conduit so I have a bunch of wires taped to the walls.
Sonic just came to my neighborhood a few months back so we have 10gig for $60 a month. I was waiting yeaaaars for them to come and they finally did!
https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1036082/
You can supposedly just make it a repeater directly which would be the simplest approach and your devices will just automatically work with it. Not sure if it will let you use the Ethernet ports as a switch at the same time though, in that case it may need to be AP mode but then you’d have two separate wifi networks. I’ve never tried to give the same wifi name and password to two different routers tho i imagine that comes with some funk or just would show as two separate networks anyway dont think they will blend. Worth trying both and see what works best for you
My shitpost answer as I am legally obligated to give is…. Just make ur wifi longer duh
I’ve done that in the past with repeater mode but I’m not sure if that’s standard or if it just worked that way on my old router.
it might be cheaper to get a repeater, if it’s not latency critical.
or set second router as bridge with same ssid
Latency is definitely critical. I’m going to be streaming with Sunshine/Moonlight.
I did something like this maybe 10 years ago and it worked just fine after disabling DHCP on the one which is supposed to be just an AP.
One thing to double check, there are protocols for gracefully switching the AP your device is connected to as you walk out of range of AP1 and into range of AP2. You might want to check if that can be supported if your setup will have routers from 2 different brands. Otherwise, your phone will probably want to hang onto a weak connection even when you’re close to the other AP. I’m not a networking person, so maybe this isn’t a problem anymore.
I’m getting another Asus and I’ve found the AP mode in the settings of the one I currently have so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
AP mode on asus router disables DHCP by default
