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My ISP provides adsl modem+router (Comtrend CT-6373). It has really bad wifi so I bought decent router (TP-LINK TD-W8980). It later turned out that my ISP forbids to use your own adsl modems. So as Plan B I decided to connect my router (R1) to original one (R2) via ethernet and use R1 as a wireless access point. How should I set it up? It actually worked for a while but my Android devices have problems with internet. When I open 192.168.1.1 from my PC I see control panel of R2, but from devices I see control panel of R1. Which makes me think that whole network is set up incorrectly. I am really not sure if I am doing it right or wrong. Any ideas?

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  • Also my PC sees different control panels at 192.168.1.1, as if routers can't figure out who should occupy the address.
    – Andrey
    Sep 9, 2014 at 22:23

4 Answers 4

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You want Bridge Mode on R2, not R1. Connect R1 and R2 together, making sure you don't plug the cable going to R1 on its WAN port. Disable DHCP on R1. You'll also want to set both routers a static IP (192.168.1.1 for R1, 192.168.1.2 for R2).

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  1. Disconnect the TP-Link router from the Comtrend router, then connect your PC to the TP-Link router.
  2. On the TP-Link router, change its IP to something in the same subnet, but outside the DHCP range, of the Comtrend router (192.168.1.2 is likely okay).
  3. On the TP-Link router, disable the DHCP service.
  4. Connect an ethernet cable to the LAN port of each router.
  5. On the Comtrend router, disable Wi-Fi.

You are accessing the Comtrend router by 192.168.1.1 and the TP-Link router by whatever address you used in step 2. You can now configure the Wi-Fi on the TP-Link router however you want.

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My provider does the same thing: though I have a 150Mb/s line, its wifi can only reach 12Mb/s, for no reason I can fathom.

So I did exactly what you did: buy a wifi-capable router and plug it behind the ISP-supplied device. However, I have plugged all my devices into the second router (the one I bought), and no device other than the router directly into the ISP device. This way, I have a single, unified LAN. It works flawlessly, of course.

My suggestion is to do the same I did: use the router as a full router, not just an AP, and let it take care of things: it is easier to configure because it is automatic.

Two recommendations:

  1. Make sure the LAN-side subnet your router is using differs from that on its WAN side. For instance, suppose the subnet of your ISP-provided modem is 192.168.1.0/24; then use something like 192.168.251.0/24 for the network behind the router you bought. The two subnets must differ.

  2. Make sure the wifi network of your router is on a different channel than the one provided by the ISP device. Ideally, they should be 2-3 channels apart (channels partially overlap), or, better still, you should turn your ISP-provided wifi network off: there is nothing to lose in this.

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  • I turned wifi off on original router, so this is not an issue. I think the problem is that if I open 192.168.1.1 I see different control panels if I refresh the page.
    – Andrey
    Sep 10, 2014 at 16:00
  • @Andrey But what about my suggestion n.1? Sep 10, 2014 at 16:02
  • I will try later, I am not at home. I am wondering won't it cause networking issues with p2p and such.
    – Andrey
    Sep 10, 2014 at 17:02
  • @Andrey You will have to forward ports on both your ISP's modem and your own router. But it is trivial to do. Sep 10, 2014 at 18:04
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I have similar situation with comcast. I use their modem plus router, but lousy WiFi, so I connected a d-link router by Ethernet to the comcast router modem, now I have two WiFi networks; when one is weak, I switch to the other one.

Works fine with Windows and Linux, as I have both Windows and Ubuntu on dual boot.

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  • That is exactly what I did and now I have problems.
    – Andrey
    Sep 10, 2014 at 9:31

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