On 17/12/2012 21:23, dennis@home wrote:
On 17/12/2012 11:11, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
I recently changed to BT fibre and have the old wireless router - which
isn't that old. Could I feed that off the BT one to act as a range
extender - situated in a different part of the house? I have CAT5
going to
the attic room and having a second transmitter up there would probably
give much better coverage - the BT one is situated next to where the line
comes into the house.


Thats what I did with my old router.
Just disable DHCP in the old router and plug it into one of the LAN
ports and it should go.
If you set the SSID and pass phrase to the same as the new one and put
it on a different channel the computers should be able to select the
best one dynamically.

For certain values of dynamically...

If you open up a laptop and connect to the strongest access point
signal, then its fine. What it does not do is actually allow roaming.
i.e. move that same machine from close to one access point to the other,
and it will still try to talk to the original connection point even when
there is another that offers a much better signal strength. Only when
you explicitly break the connection (or it goes out of range) will
windows look for an alternative. You then have a secondary problem that
the router injecting internet connectivity into the APs won't have any
way of being told that the connection point has changed - hence it will
still be using the MAC address of the previous point. This normally
resolves in a minute or so when it works out its not getting responses,
and does an ARP broadcast to find the client again - but seamless is it not!


--
Cheers,

John.

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