Reccomend me wifi router

gazz

gazz

gazz

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17 Jan 2011
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ATM i have BT infinity with a homehub 5 i think it is, this is at one end of the house where the phone line is located, and serves that end of the house with wifi.

The wifi dosent make it to my bedroom, so i ran a 30 meter lan cable from the main homehub, and used an old homehub 3 in my bedroom.

i followed some guide on the net that turned it into a separate network 9something with turning off DHCP or something)

But it works, i have a separate network linked to the main bt hub, but its getting slower and slower.

So i think its time to replace the router in the bedroom. but what with?


ideally i'd like one with 5 lan ports, as i have 4 items that i want wired connections to, but only 3 ports are available with my current set up after using one to link to the homehub 5.


Would also like a decent wifi connection, this one keeps dropping out all the time, and will be getting a new laptop soon with that wifi 6 stuff in it, so not sure if i can match up something that will work it's best for the wifi side of things, (you can tell i'm out of my depth here can't you)

i just really watch youtube, download occasional games off steam etc, i dont play any online gaming, so i dont need something ultra fast, but i want something where it's at least faster than my phones 4G speeds when in hotspot mode as it is now.

budget, around £50 if possible,
 
At your price point I think the only thing that fits the WiFi 6 requirement is an honor router 3 or Huawei AX3
 
ahh, wondered if i was being too cheap,

so, if i double the price to ~£100, do i get any better options, or would the honour router 3 / huawei AX3 do what i need?
 
i've got a single cable running from the BT hub to my room,

ATM i plug that into one of the lan ports of the old bt hub, and have 3 ports left... for 4 items i want to connect.....

i read something about being able to use the WAN port on the router in my room to connect back to a lan port on the main router... doing that would free up the 4 lan ports i need??

Then i need the wifi part to connect the laptop, phone, tablets, gf's kindle and so on.
 
Not with the old BT hub. Using the WAN port will mean anything connected to that hub will be isolated from the main BT hub. Ideally you want everything to be on a single network, especially if you have smart home devices.

The above AX3 will work, I believe they have a mode called Bridge AP mode which is the mode you want to use, and gives you free access to all 4 LAN ports. For your use it should be completely fine.

Another suggestion, turn off the smart Wi-Fi feature on the BT Hubs. They cause more trouble that what it's worth and far more stable when set to a fixed channel. I had the BT Hub 5 and 3 and Wi-Fi was more reliable when I turned it off. You can also have the Wi-Fi name and password the same on both, just make sure they're on different non-overlapping channels (eg channel 1 on the main BT hub, channel 6 on the second router). This was what I did before I moved over to a unifi setup and later a mesh one.
 
i have the 2nd hub (the one in my room) set up as a totally different network... i think,
it is for the wifi side anyway, i turned off DHCP and all that in the 2nd hub following a guide on the net, and gave this hub it's own name/ssid and all that.. but i think i'm talking about the wifi.

Logging into the main hub, it just shows 6 items connected to lan port 1.

3 of them being my desktop pc, PS5 and smart TV, wifi connected ones will be the laptop, phone and android tablet that i'm using 'touch portal' on (a virtual stream box thing that i am using to give one click commands to Fusion 360 on the laptop)

I wanted a seperate mini network just for my bedroom so i am not using the main hub (sometimes i'll get a wifi signal from it here, but it's dog slow)
but i was using some software that sent data from a simulator running on the pc to 3 x android tablets, which gave me screens from a simulator game,

Only time i needed to talk to anything on the other hub was to print on the printer connected to the other pc... but since a windows update took away something (home group or something) i cant access the other pc's printer anymore... but i'm looking at getting a wifi printer anyway sometime.
 
From the way you have it at the moment, since you turned off DHCP that means the main router is the one serving the IPs, so you have one unified network. It's just two different wireless access points with different names/password (think of it as two front doors to a house).

This should allow the shared printer to work, but as you discovered, sometimes Windows can mess something up with printer sharing. A Wi-Fi printer definitely makes this easier. As long as the second router is in access point mode/DHCP off, devices on both Wi-Fi networks should be able to communicate with the printer no matter what Wi-Fi it is connected to, as long as you have everything set up correctly.
 
gazz said:
brilliant, thankyou for explaining what must be simple stuff for most people.
Click to expand...

Don't kid yourself. There are incredibly skilled members on here for whom subnetting is the sort of thing they do in their sleep but 99% of the members on here and 99.99999% of the population wouldn't even have tackled what you did in software, let alone running a cable. There are members on here who can't spell DHCP :)
 
Well the AX3 router is in and working.

first thing to note... i thought there were 4 lan ports plus a wan port, but its 3 lan and one wan/lan port.

so i still have one item unconnected via cable like i had before, but it's just the AV amp's connection, it connects via wifi for updates fine, and i gave up streaming music to it... due to the crappy connection from the old BT hub, but i've not really missed streaming music, as i'm more likely to be messing on the PC or playstation nowadays.


Anyway, i unboxed it, unplugged the homehub 5 and chucked it in the bin,
plugged the lan cable from the BT smart hub 2 at the other end of the house into the WAN port of the AX3, powered it up,

Got into the router on my phone, and set up the passwords, gave the wifi network a name (SSID i think) and i had the laptop connecting straight away (as i used the same SSID and password i had for the homehub 5)
then went in to settings and disabled DHCP, this stopped me adding the tablets to the wifi network... then i spotted the 'connect to the internet page' and put that from DHCP to Bridge(AP) mode,

The tablets then connected to the wifi, and i checked the BT smart hubs setup page thingy, and all the devises were showing up as before on the lan port the router in my room is connected to.


Plugged in the pc, playstation and smart tv's lan cables, and they were on the network, and all seems fine.

Tried a wifi speed test again, the one i did last night with the home hub 5 as my access point this end of the house, i got 288 Mbps for the wifi link, and 33 up and 13 down to the net (bt infinity, supposed to be 45 to 65 Mbps here they claim)

Today on the AX3 i got, 620 Mbps WIFI link speed, and 49 down and 15 up, (i get a 14Ms internet ping on the new router, but it was 15Ms on the homehub.. that bit should be down to the smart hub i think?)


So i think i can say the old BT homehub 5 was my bottleneck,
And so far the laptops not lost the wifi connection... that was another issue i had, it would lose the internet but still be connected, i'd just disconnect and reconnect the wifi on the laptop, and it'd be back up.. for another few hours/minutes before it went again.

Next may be to replace the BT smart hub, but thats for another day.

Thankyou everyone for your help with this.
 
If you really need more ethernet ports you can just grab a cheap gigabit switch and then plug that into the AX3.

Glad it looks like a big improvement from before. The BT Hubs definitely is a bottleneck.
 
Gotya, i really am out of my depth with this stuff,

Tho as usual with me, when i stand back and look at things, i really don't need a wired connection to the AV amp, as it only connects to the net to download firmware updates really,
And if i think harder... even the PS5 does not need a wired connection, i do not play multiplayer games, and online is only for downloading games and updates.

i guess i should try the PS5 on the wifi network from this router, read about people complaining that it does not play nice with PS5's, some crap about their ISP contacting them telling them they are responsible for attacks on other computers, and it was all down to the PS5's wifi etc,

But i'd imagine the PS5 may have one of these wifi 6 cards in it... or at the least it'll have the latest and fastest wifi card of all the items i own, until i get a new laptop that is.


Really liking how stable the connection is on this new router, my laptops not lost internet connectivity once, on the bt hub it's have lost it at least once an hour, strange as other devises still had full net access, just the laptop was on the network but no outside access... i was beginning to think it was the laptop at fault.
 
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