Networking – Setup 3 Routers at home

networkingrouterwireless-router

The wireless signal cannot transmit through floor. So I decided to have 3 routers setup at home. Here is my plan to setup. Please let me know if it make sense.

  1. SMC. It is a modern with router. It locates in the first floor, Rogers cable connected to this router. It is the main router to connect outside. I turned off the wireless on the router. It has 4 ports connected to SMC all with wires.
    First one connect to D-615(second router)
    Second one connect to D-815(third router)
    Third one connect to WD Mybook live(NAS HHD)
    Fourth one connect to TV player
  2. DLink 615. It is a wireless router. It located in the first floor as well, but close to bedroom. It has 4 ports, but I only use 3 of them connected to PC. Also there are wireless device need connect to this router as well.
  3. DLInk 815. It is a wireless router. It located in the second floor. It connected with 3 PCs and also accept wireless connection. The signal in second floor is very weak if using D-615 wireless connection.

I setup the SMC to 192.168.0.1 with DHCP, D-615 to 192.168.2.1 with DHCP and D-815 to 192.168.1.1. I cannot get rid of the second router, since SMC doesn't have enough wired port. And I need to D-815 because the signal problem. Wondering if this gonna work? Thanks.

Best Answer

It should work just fine -- as I understand it, you have a main router which your wireless routers are plugged into, and various equipment plugged into each router.

Since your laptop (or PC with wireless NIC) can only be connected to one wireless network at a time, it doesn't really matter too much how you set up the IP addresses.

One COMPLETELY OPTIONAL suggestion I have for you to make things work even more smoothly though is to configure ONLY your main router to serve DHCP and set up your wireless routers to not do this (if your wireless routers don't support passing IP traffic through from the WAN port without NAT, then you should at least be able to disable the DHCP server options and just not use the "WAN" ports at all -- instead of connecting the main router to the WAN ports just plug it into the regular LAN ports of the wireless routers that have DHCP disabled). This way, you have only one DHCP server managing all your IP addresses, and when you switch to a different wireless router your wireless devices keep the same IPs.

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