Using router as WIFI access point

[Road2Ruin]

Morning/afternoon chaps,

Just a bit of a sanity check here. I am with plusnet and have not been having a lot of luck with their router's wifi (it keeps dropping random things at random intervals). I have asked for another one and this does the same. However, up stairs I have a powerline wifi access point and this works perfectly (never dropping anything). My plan then is to turn off the wifi on the router and instead use a second router to provide the wifi (I have loads of spares). I will turn off the DHCP in the router that only supplies the wifi and change the SSID and password to the existing wifi. Hopefully then creating a wifi access point that wont drop connections and to save setting up all the TVs and Sonos again they should just connect to the new access point. Am I correct?

R2R

[Gren]

Yes. If it's anything like my Virgin hub there is a 'modem mode' setting that does just what you want and then your own router does everything

[AW10]

It's perhaps worth checking what channel your troublesome router/access point is set to - if it's the same as a strong neighbouring one you can get loads of dropped connections. Some allow you to set the channel to automatic and it picks the best one based on least likelihood of interference and/or you can run a scan on the access point to see what others are out there.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

There is also the possibility if using certain channels in the 5ghz band that it interferes with things like radar so if your near any airstrip or things like that it can cause periodic dropouts

[AW10]

Trustmeimadoctor, what HW/SW did you use to create those graphs?

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Thats the fritz wifi app

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.a...

[PRTVR]

If you have an android phone/tablet wifi analyser is very good for showing various wifi details as above.

[Road2Ruin]

Thanks all, the Wi-Fi channel is set to automatic and we live about 100m from the nearest property, so I doubt that is the issue.

Will fix up the second router and give it a go.

[anonymous-user]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

There is also the possibility if using certain channels in the 5ghz band that it interferes with things like radar so if your near any airstrip or things like that it can cause periodic dropouts

Wi-Fi routers operating in parts of the 5GHz band are required to implement DFS to protect weather radar, basically if the router detects a radar it changes the Wi-Fi operating channel and blacklist the channel radar was detected on for a period of time.

The DFS function does not protect the router from interference, only the weather radar from Wi-Fi interference.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

But unfortunately when it swaps channels it can drop if it isnt handled correctly by the master or slave device