have you ever been in a situation where your wi-fi doesn't reach far enough and
you can't run a cable you could buy a repeater or another mesh node but those
things cost money
fortunately you actually might be in luck if you or a friend has an old
router lying around like this one this is actually a new router but many
modern wireless routers even cheaper ones have a feature called wireless
distribution system or wds this
essentially allows you to disable the features you're not using and deploy the
router as a repeater with the added advantage of giving you access to the
wired Ethernet ports on the back
those babies you can think of it kind of like running an Ethernet cable but
wirelessly so how do you set it up although there's usually a simple on off
option for wds in your router settings it's wise to do a little bit of
configuration work as well in order to ensure it works properly start by
manually setting both your main wireless network and the secondary router to the
same channel so they can communicate to keep the connection stable you'll want
to give your secondary router a static internal ip address but how do you do
that well on a home network every connected
device is assigned a private ip address that typically starts with 192.168.
this system ensures any incoming data is sent to the correct device usually your
router assigns these addresses automatically through a system called dhcp but for wds you'll want to give
your secondary router one ip address it hangs onto permanently instead of having
your main router automatically give it a new one periodically which can cause
connection problems log into your main router and find the place in the
settings that will show you a list of all the connected clients then go back
to your secondary router and give it an ip address in the lan settings that
isn't currently being used by any of those devices make sure you start it
with 192.168.0 or one depending on which one
your network uses and using a fourth number that's between 1 and 255. you can
also set the second router's static ip within the first router's dhcp settings
by finding the second router's Mac Address and putting it in there after
you do this go ahead and turn on wds you'll get a prompt asking which
wireless network you want to connect to so pick the right one and punch in the
password make sure by the way that you turn off the dhcp feature on the
secondary router your primary router will handle assigning internal ip
addresses and having two devices on the same network handling dhcp functions oh
that can cause some pretty bizarre problems get flashbacks from here you're
all set to use your secondary router if you're trying to connect a wired device
just plug in the Ethernet cable to one of the lan ports not the wan port the
lan ports if you're trying to connect wirelessly instead punch in the
credentials that your secondary router is using to connect directly to it
although you can also give your secondary router the same login information as the primary one to have
your wi-fi devices switch automatically between them
but wait there's a big caveat with using wds because wi-fi is a half duplex
protocol that can't send and receive at the same time wds tends to be slower
than using a single router in fact if you're connected to the
secondary router wirelessly your speeds will be roughly cut in half
also keep in mind that you may not want to assign both routers the same login
information as client devices tend to hang on to the first access point they
can connect to for dear life so your phone for example may not switch back to
the primary router the way you would like to once it's in range but while wds
isn't perfect it's a great way to repurpose an old router if you don't
need the highest possible speeds and can be a lifesaver if you have a wired only
device you really need to use unless you don't mind tripping over the 100 foot
Ethernet cable you've snaked all through your house it's an aesthetic dystopian
cyberpunk cables everywhere but if you're not into cables you might want to
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