Killing WiFi dead zones in your home, without a mesh system

WiFi dead zones in a home

What do I need?

1. A spare router 🏕️
2. 30mins of time ⏰
3. A bit of patience 🧘🏻‍♀️

We all have that one room where the WiFi becomes unusable. If you google, you will find there are mesh systems available, which are somewhat costly. 🤕😤

All of the routers that we buy has hardware capable of mesh, the router companies limit it in their firmware to sell another product to you. Some people go to the extent of flashing their router to enable mesh. 😱

The other alternative is to setup any spare router in repeating mode, but this natively doesn’t allow a seamless experience. You’ll have to keep a different name for this WiFi and switch manually. In this article you will find a very nifty way to setup uninterrupted WiFi for your home. 😎🤗

You can use your old router, the one from your old ISP. You can just reset that router by turning on the router and pressing the reset button (pen works) for ~5–10secs. 👩🏻‍🌾

How to go to the router settings?
1. Connect to this router either using LAN or WiFi (the default WiFi password will be printed on the back of the router). Most of the routers have the home IP address 192.168.1.1or 192.168.0.1 💪🏼💪🏼

2. Open this IP in your browser, it should present a login screen.

3. Time for some dictionary based hacking, you can search for default login and password on google! Just search with your router make and model. If you are using a router from your old ISP, they usually modify this password. You can search for the password on Google again, just add the name of your ISP in your search. In my case, my old router was from ACT and it had the password act@123 🪄🪄

What settings do I need to modify?
Yeah! The neat part. We will be using this new router in repeater mode and we will keep the SSID (name of the WiFi) for all the bands same. This usually causes conflicts with the main router. To avoid this, we will hard-code the channels. ✌️🚀

WiFi config on my repeating router:

Same SSID for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands

Hard-coded channels

In the above images, there are two things to notice:
1. The SSID (name of the WiFi) and password is same for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands
2. We have fixed the channel to Channel 1 for 2.4GHz and Channel 36 for 5GHz

WiFi config on my main router:

Two things to notice:
1. Here again the SSID and password is same, same as the repeating router
2. We have fixed the channel to Channel 2 on 2.4GHz and Channel 40 on 5GHz band.

Repeater setup:

1. Go back to your repeating router and find the section for Wireless Repeating, turn it on and search for the available WiFi networks.
2. Select your WiFi (it will show two with the same name because of 2.4GHz and 5GHz) and add the password.
3. Restart.
4. Test the internet speed, if it is below 40Mbps and you have a plan more than that, then most probably you are repeating the 2.4GHz band. Go back to wireless repeating section and select the other one in the WiFi search.

That’s it folks! You now have uninterrupted WiFi for your whole house. Your devices will keep switching the WiFi based on signal strength without you having to do anything!

Summary

We basically setup a router in repeating mode, kept the same SSID and password for all the 4 frequencies, fixed the channel for the bands to achieve the seamless experience.