turning an old router into a bridge

Fruhmann

okay. so, today the cable company came today and moved the modem into my room, top floor of the house. I need to be able to get the wifi signal to the lower floors. it's getting there but could be stronger.

so i look online to see about making the older router a bridge. lots of conflicting details in how-tos and videos, so i figure i'll reach out to my fellow paxers to get more credible info. any links or tips you can share would be appreciated.

also, initially i was under the impression i could set the old router to bridge mode, bring it to the dead zone of the house and just plug it into the electrical outlet. no rj45 wires connected, no separate $60 WAP device with it. is that possible or was i just mistaken?

thanks!

Cabezone

Depends entirely on the router.

Zxerol

Sure it's possible. I have a workhorse Linksys WRT54G flashed with Tomato to bridge a couple of machines to the wifi network. But if you're trying to reach a weak spot as you describe, all you're doing is trading one wireless interface for another, and that wouldn't do all that much to help at all (other than incidental things like the bridge possibly having higher transmit power).

Daenris

It sounds like you might want a wireless extender/repeater instead of a bridge. It's probably unlikely your router supports this by default, but depending on the model it might be possible to flash DD-WRT or Tomato on it to allow you to set it up like that. Here are the supported routers for Tomato and the router search for DD-WRT.