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 the 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?
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 LAN port, 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 which everyone 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 the 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 be strapping a clothes hanger wrapped in tin foil
to your phone. We all have our embarrassing past. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this
video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with your ideas for topics
that we should cover in the future.