got a crappy Wi-Fi signal you might be wondering why can't you just add a
second router to your network and get twice the coverage it turns out you
actually can although it takes a little bit of effort and there are some caveats
that you should be aware of before we dive in we'd like to thank our good friend Joel crane for helping us out
with this walkthrough Step Zero it's actually important to know what your
typical Wi-Fi router does it not only
emits a Wi-Fi signal it's also responsible for moving traffic between
internet and your home which is the actual routing part as well as ensuring
that the right traffic goes to the right device so a video you're trying to watch
on your phone in bed won't instead get sent to your TV in the living room this
job of sending data to the correct place is typically handled by a feature in
your router called the dynamic host configuration protocol or DHCP how DHCP
does this is by assigning every gadget on your home network a private IP
address usually starting with 192.168. something but why do you need
to know this in order to add a second router well regardless of exactly how
many routers you have only one of them should have DHCP turned on if more than
one router tries to assign private IP addresses they'll often end up
conflicting with each other and assigning different addresses to the same device which can cause all kinds of
Errors when that device tries to communicate so how do you ensure that
this does not happen we'll tell you right after you thank lenode for
sponsoring today's video lenode is a powerful Linux based cloud computing
service from Akamai that's affordable and easy to use they have a large
marketplace with one-click apps to quickly deploy servers for website
development file hosting database management video hosting or even video
game servers their affordable pricing has no hidden fees and you only pay for
what you use best of all Lil node has data centers worldwide and 100 human 24
7 365 customer service that's breachable by phone email or social media sign up
for a free account today and get a 100 60 day credit on your new lenode account
at the the link below start by hooking up your second router to a PC with an
Ethernet cable just use one of the Lan ports and manually assign it an IP
address in your router settings make sure it is not something that's already
being used by another device in your network you can check by going to your
primary router setting page and looking for a list of connected devices or
clients just pick an address that is not on this list for example if your primary
router is using 192.168.1.1 try giving the second router
an address of 192.168.1.2 if nothing else is using
that reboot your second router and once it's back up go back into the settings
and disable DHCP leaving it enabled only
on the one router that's actually connected to your modem some routers
call this AP mode where AP stands for access point essentially you're telling
that second router just to emit a Wi-Fi signal while leaving all the actual
routing to the primary router after you've done this connect your primary
and secondary routers via their Lan ports not the one import very important
not that one and configure the second router to use the same network name or
SSID and password as your existing Wi-Fi network that way any devices in your
home should roam between the two routers locking on to whichever one has the best
signal but for that to work the physical placement of these routers needs to make
sense put your second router somewhere far enough away so there isn't a bunch
of signal overlap which you can roughly measure with a smartphone signal
strength app but not so far away that you're leaving a big dead zone in
between them you want a healthy Venn diagram this process can obviously
involve some trial and error and to make matters more complicated many smart
devices are quite stupid in the sense that they'll stay connected to a weak
access point for longer than they really should if you're finding that this is
the case when using a second router you might just want to name it something
different and just connect to it manually of course if this all just
sounds like a huge pain it is a bit easier just to get a Mesh networking kit
off the shelf if you need better Wi-Fi coverage but if you really do want to
use that second router you just have laying around anyway this guide should
at the very least beat strapping a clothes hanger wrapped in tin foil to
your phone we all have our embarrassing past so thanks for watching guys if you
like this video hit like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section
with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future