Many of you who know me may have been surprised by my blog posts to date. What is this? Movies, food, random posts, is this the same Nilesh? Well, for all those who may have wondered, I have unleashed my inner geek, here is a tech post.
For many months now, I have been plagued by a poor WiFi signal from my home ADSL Modem+WiFi Router. While the signal is good enough to reach about half my home, it does not reach all corners and this has been a constant source of irritation for me. I have been meaning to do something about it, however I have been hampered by the fact that my current ADSL modem is provided by my ISP and is a pretty old model (at least 3 years old). I have been looking for a newer generation modem+router that supports the 802.11N standard (for those who came in late, WiFi typically comes in 3 flavours – 802.11b/802.11g and 802.11N – leaving aside other complexities, N is the current standard and offers the best range, g is usually more prevalent everywhere and b is close to being obsolete).
I searched high and low (bear in mind this is India and that too Pune), however I could not find a suitable ADSL modem+router which supported 802.11N. Meanwhile, I got distracted in seeing whether the Olive Nexus could work with my existing Reliance NetConnect broadband USB dongle to create a hotspot, however got dissuaded when the store which sells it, itself did not make any warranties about suitability of the product. I also looked for a WiFi signal repeater, but again could not find a suitable product locally. I had almost resigned myself to living with this situation till a chance visit to a nearby Croma store got me thinking.
No, they did not have a suitable ADSL modem but they had a lot of 802.11 N capable WiFi routers. However, all of them were designed for working with Cable Modems or with a Leased Line kind of situation (possibly for offices who want to create a WiFi hotspot could find them suitable). Then I had my bright idea, why couldn’t I get a 802.11N WiFi router and connect it to my existing ADSL Modem? I tried to explain what I intended to do to the store network guy, but I don’t think he even understood what I was trying to tell him.
On a hunch, I bought it anyway (it was a Belkin N150 WiFi Router which cost about 2100 Rupees or just over US $40) and took it home. The first question was how do I set it up? The way I worked it out was that my current ADSL Modem would be the device that connects to my phone line (obviously since the Belkin was not a ADSL modem). The modem would be the primary internet gateway for the home network. I would need to suppress the WiFi capability of the modem, use the new WiFi router to connect to the modem and then have the WiFi router act as a DHCP server for ad-hoc wireless connections).
I needed to now setup the new WiFi router in a way that it thought that I had a dedicated connection to the Internet. My modem was assigned the LAN IP address of 192.168.1.1 and the WiFi router a WAN address of 192.168.1.50. Thus, my modem and WiFi router came onto the same network and my WiFi router thought that I had a dedicated internet connection, since its gateway was set to 192.168.1.1, the fact that my modem WAN IP was dynamic was completely hidden from the WiFi router. I now turned on WiFi on the router and assigned a different subnet (192.168.2.x) with its LAN address as 192.168.2.1. I used the DHCP capability of the WiFi router and devices connecting to the WiFi network got a gateway IP of 192.168.2.1. It now only remained to set the same WiFi credentials onto the new WiFi router to what used to exist on my ADSL modem and voila! devices connecting in the new setup didn’t even realise that anything had changed! My daughter who had been curiously watching me mutter to myself as I was flailing around with various wires and IP configurations was suitably impressed, more so since now the WiFi signal reached her bedroom and she no longer had to come out to the living room to connect to the internet!
I checked and the 802.11N enhanced signal now reached through my apartment. Mission accomplished! Any of you who would like further details are free to email me.
