Wireless Access At Home

[meadish_sweetball]

First, please bear with me, as my understanding of networking is spotty and limited.

I have a 3mbps ADSL connection (Hinet) from CAT. It comes with a Zyxel router/modem, which is capable enough. But it has no wireless functionality.

So, a couple of years ago, to get wireless access for smartphones at home, I connected my D-Link wireless router/modem to the Zyxel router/modem. This setup worked. But the wireless signal is not very strong, and the speed was very low when I applied wireless security. It seems that the security was too taxing for the router to handle, but I don't want to run a network without it. I made do, as I wasn't completely dependent on the strength or speed of wireless.

But now I have a live-in guest and the situation is a bit different. So I went ahead and bought an ASUS RT-N66U wireless router, since it has generally received very good reviews on international sites.

And I'm trying to set it up. But not having much luck, so far. The setup guide wants me to let the new ASUS router handle the routing, and also the WAN connection. But will CAT be happy with that, i.e. does anyone know whether they will accept a new MAC address and router that distributes the connection to other devices?

I was thinking they might make a fuss about it. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, to avoid any such problems I thought I'd use the same type of setup as I had with the D-Link, where the Zyxel still handles the WAN side, and the ASUS would only serve the local wireless network. My thinking is, the ASUS should have much more processing power to handle it, and it ought to be faster than the D-Link.

But it doesn't seem to be working. The ASUS seems to assign IPs in a different subnet (169.254.X.X) than the main one (192.168.1.X), and I cannot find a page to specify the subnet for DHCP allocation in the ASUS router settings.

Any ideas?

[Crossy]

Plug your existing router into the WAN port of the ASUS, use its wireless and LAN ports for your home network.

[meadish_sweetball]

Thanks Crossy. I tried that at first but it didn't seem to work, for some reason I am not sure of.

However, I've got a working setup now, and it's much faster than before. Turns out that the problem was the ASUS was set to Static IP connections only, and the phone I tried to connect from was trying to get DHCP.

Once I changed the setting on the phone to Static IPs, it is now working! So I'm a happy camper.

[draftvader]

Yes, the RT-N66U is a great router. Its larger power is in the fact that it will accept custom firmwares. Don't worry about these right now, if the stock firmware is doing the job you need then DON'T play. If you find any of the following to be an issue then come back and ask more:

1) Wireless range (though this can also be solved with new aerials)

2) Router stability

3) Bandwidth hogging (i.e. your live-in guest starts to download torrents uncontrollably)

Otherwise, good purchase.