Hey, do you need to know more about how things connect together?
Hey, do you need to know more about how things connect together?
Hi, my friend is having trouble with his internet on the computer in his garage annex. He lives in a separate part of the house that isn't connected to the main house where the big internet router is located. Right now, from the main router, there is a cat6 cable running outside through walls until it reaches the annex and then into another router. This second router gives out a different network name for wireless connections. From this second router, another cat6 cable goes straight to his PC. The quality of this setup is very unreliable. It's actually worse than being at the main house, even though he has a full wired connection here too. Since the distance between the two parts of the house is less than 50 meters, the long cable should not be losing any signal because it isn't that far to go. Using the wifi from the annex router makes the PC connection much worse and even hurts when playing simple discord calls with lag. He doesn't know if he needs a full router set up in the annex or if something simpler like a wifi booster that passes through the ethernet cable would work better. If you have any more info needed to help solve this problem, just ask me here. Please send links to any networking devices that could fix this issue. Thanks!
There are two ways to get a good network connection. If he needs to be on the same network as his house, he should connect one cable from an internet port on Router 1 to an internet port on his new router and turn OFF DHCP settings on his second router. It is best to give his second router a fixed address when you set it up with the first router (which will act like a bridge). This way, your second router becomes just an extension that lets all devices talk to each other through Router 1 without needing special addresses.
If he needs a separate network that won't mess with anything on the main network, then he should connect one cable from Router 1 to his WAN port and set up his new router differently (for example, if your first router is at 192.168.0.1, make sure yours starts at 192.168.0.2). He also needs to tell his second router where the main router's gateway address is, by setting that gateway to 192.168.0.1 in my example, but leaving DHCP turned ON on his new router.
It looks like someone without any networking skills made this mess by just connecting routers together. The easiest fix is to use an access point in the garage instead of a router, let your main router handle all internet connections and IP addresses, and make sure you don't have two separate networks (double NAT) where some ports aren't working for the ISP. You might try turning off the DHCP function on the extra router so it only acts as an access point. The correct step is to actually get your own internet line for this apartment. If your landlord found out that they are sharing the service with other tenants in separate apartments instead of just renting a room, they could be in big trouble because their rules don't allow that.