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I have a tri-band router, an Asus RT-AC3200, with one 802.11g network and two 802.11ac.

My PC is connected to one 802.11ac, when I try to SSH to any device on the 802.11g I cannot connect. If I switch my PC to 802.11g, then all is well and good.

My network printer is 802.11g and similarly only works when I use the 802.11g on my PC

They all share the same 192.168.2.xx IP address range, but I cannot communicate between subnets (if that's the name).

ssh: connect to host 192.168.2.84 port 22: Connection timed out

How can I communicate between 802.11ac and 802.11g within the same home network?

Can someone please point me in the right direction? Networking is all new to me. I have checked all IP addresses with ifconfig, everything is there and connectable, but obviously I am omitting something.

All devices are connected wirelessly to the one router. Only one is 5G, the rest are 2.4G.

They all share the same address range, the 2.4G devices can only can only communicate with each other, not with the 5G device.

Surely it doesn't matter? Once the data enters the router, it should get shuttled to whichever IP it is directed to, shouldn't it?

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  • It might help if you identified the brand and model of the router.  Also, have you considered making them really independent subnets (e.g., 192.168.2.xx, 192.168.3.xx, and 192.168.4.xx?    Please do not respond in comments; edit your question to make it clearer and more complete. Oct 6, 2018 at 3:03
  • This would only be possible if 802.11g device supported 5 GHz. 802.11ac is a 5.0 GHz only standard. Since it does not it means 802.11g devices cannot connect to an 802.11ac only network. If your ASUS RT-AC3200, supports both WiFi-5 (802.11ac) and WiFI-4 (802.11n), then what you want is possible.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 6, 2018 at 5:38

2 Answers 2

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I have not worked on ASUS RT's control panels, so this is just a theoretical example.

  1. Configure three different network ranges for the three subnets, not the same one.
    For example, use 192.168.2.0 for your 802.11g, 192.168.3.0 for your first 802.11ac, and 192.168.4.0 for your last network. This will allow you to setup routes between the different networks.
  2. In your control panel, you need to find the "Routing" settings. You need to configure static routes:
    Route A: Desination IP 192.168.2.0, Subnet mask 255.255.255.0, Interface [that network's interface]
    Route B: Destination IP 192.168.3.0, Subnet mask 255.255.255.0, Interface [that network's interface]
    And repeat the same for the last network.

Surely it doesn't matter? Once the data enters the router, it should get shuttled to whichever IP it is directed to, shouldn't it?

It should be directed, yes. But that will happen only if they were 3 different networks and if the router knew the route to them. That is why you configure static route, to tell the router that for example all traffic for 192.168.3.4 must go through interface 3.
Three different networks, but with the same network range & subnet mask (as in your case) cannot be routed. They are on 3 different interfaces (since it's a tri-band router, each band has its own interface), thus every packet for the network 192.168.2.0 will stay in the same interface it was sent from, since it has the same IP address range. How should the router know whether the packet destined to 192.168.2.100 is for interface A, B, or C, if they're all the same? That is why it cannot happen this way, you need 3 different IP ranges for the networks, and static routing.

Note: Your router may be smart enough (may support dynamic routing protocols) to route to its different interfaces automatically and you might not need to configure static routing.

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  • Thank you very much. Makes a lot of sense now you put it that way.How do I mark this as solved?
    – Monkeybus
    Oct 8, 2018 at 8:27
  • @Monkeybus you click on the "tick" that is below the vote count on the left of my post. :) See How does accepting an answer work?
    – Fanatique
    Oct 9, 2018 at 11:52
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Yes, it is possible, but it depends entirely on the capabilities of your router and wireless access points (if they're not the same device). It sounds like it's segregating your LAN and WLAN data from each other. Again, yes it's possible, but you are going to need to know how to configure your router.

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