How do I connect two wireless routers to one internet connection?

I have two wireless routers, one Linksys N and one Netgear G available in the box. My laptop is N and my wife's laptop is G. But I only have one internet connection. As far as I know the N network is degraded to G if I add her G laptop to the network. Could I activate the G router by connecting the two routers via a lan cable and assign her laptop to it? I would try that but searching and reading posts here makes me think I should avoid uneducated experiments.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jack

Hi jborchel

Use one wireless router for both laptops.

I'm doing that now but I believe that my laptop's N speed is degraded to G speed when a G equipped laptop, my wife's, is added to the network. Right?

Jack

Right, the N can also do g.

Hi jborchel

If you are looking for Max speed for both laptops, you would need two phone lines, two broadband packages, & etc.

Sounds like there is no way to put both routers on the same network connection. I guess my only option is to buy an N laptop card that will replace my wife's integrated G antenna.

Jack

Hi jborchel

That will not help with your speed very much. The speed comes from your phone line, more PC's connected slower each one is.

theog said:

Hi jborchel

That will not help with your speed very much. The speed comes from your phone line, more PC's connected slower each one is.

Click to expand...

That only applies if both systems try to down- or upload things at the same time. For normal web-browsing you should not notice a difference. I operate several systems on the same line all the time - and there is very rarely interference.

I'm always confused when I try to compare the various speeds of the chain but if I'm correct the speed of the wireless is 50 to 100 times greater than my wireless ISP. When I run a speed test I get about 1.2 Mbps download speed. Under G and N combined use my max speed of the router wireless portion is 54 Mbps. The question is:

Under this situation, i.e. max ISP speed of 1.5 Mbps, will going to exclusive N speed show any real-time speed increase over G?

Any experiences, comments?

Jack

I can understand this if you have more devices on your network that you wish to share files between, maybe you have a PC connected by wires for example.
However if it's just your laptops then there is no need for running two AP's

Anyway if you wish to continue down this route you could try the following:

Select the router that will serve your internet connection.
Ensure DHCP is enabled and note the subnet eg. 192.168.1.0/24
Create your Wireless LAN profile eg WirelessN

Now take your second router and logon to it:
Disable DHCP
Create your Wireless LAN profile but ensure the SSID is of a different name eg WirelessG

The ethernet ports on your routers are a switch, so take the second router and plug a CAT5 cable from one of the switch ports straight into a switch port of the first switch.

Job done, you should now have two Wireless LAN's on the same network using a single internet connection.

But as I say only useful if you need to transfer files between other devices and you want full speed capability of Wireless, it won't make a blind bit of difference to your internet connection speed since that is going to be considerably slower than your local network.

DC187,

Thanks for the recommendation. One further challenge. When I set up my N only connection I found that I couldn't print as my printer is a wireless G model. So I wonder if the printer could be associated with my wife's G network and I can pass printer jobs through my N router to her G router via the ethernet cable. I assume I would do this by assigning it's address in my printer device manager, or whatever it's called.

I guess I could buy her an N card and replace my N router with a D-Link DIR-655, an N router with USB attachment to my printer. But that's another $200.

jborchel said:

I'm always confused when I try to compare the various speeds of the chain but if I'm correct the speed of the wireless is 50 to 100 times greater than my wireless ISP. When I run a speed test I get about 1.2 Mbps download speed. Under G and N combined use my max speed of the router wireless portion is 54 Mbps. The question is:

Under this situation, i.e. max ISP speed of 1.5 Mbps, will going to exclusive N speed show any real-time speed increase over G?

Any experiences, comments?

Jack

Click to expand...

the only time it will show any difference is when you are transfering data on the local area network (ie btween laptops) there the max speed would go from 54>>>280 if BOTH lappy have "N"

In terms of from the ISP, if its 1.5 thats it even if you ran fiber optic from you pc to the modem its still 1.5mb from the isp

Ken