Dual HotSpot Home

As a Simple weekend project I added a second wifi access point to my house.  We have always had our router/wifi access point upstairs and our floor plan is pretty open, so you can get coverage anywhere in the house.  It wasn't a great signal in some places downstairs,but no big deal.

Now that we have lots of wifi devices - namely an iPad and ASUS Transformer - that can play video and access complex websites the weak signal was frustrating at times. It turns out that it was easy to extend our wireless network.

I took my old Linksys wrtg54 router out of storage and connected it to the wired network connection downstairs that I was using for a media PC. I then connected the media PC into one of the ports on the Linksys. Using the media PC, I browsed to the admin interface for the Linksys. I disabled its dhcp server, because this was being handled by the existing router upstairs. I also set the Linksys to a static IP address that was not in the dhcp range and did not conflict with the existing router. I also changed the said to be different from the upstairs, so I could easily Tell which one I was connected to.

Now I connect with excellent signal strength both downstairs and upstairs, which was great for watching The Masters today before the regular network coverage started.  I should have done this months ago,

Todd