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Daisy-chaining routers

shermans
Pro
Posts: 1,304
Thanks: 102
Fixes: 3
Registered: ‎07-09-2007

Daisy-chaining routers

Can anyone help with this problem ?  I have an old house - one room wide, but three old cottages joined together to make one, with of course between two and four foot thick walls between them, plus an exterior office above my garage.  WiFi has always been a problem. I have got round it by using five old routers in an ethernet daisy chain, mainly through the loft, but of course the garage is a further 20 meters with ethernet cable buried under the tarmac !  It has worked for years - all old Plusnet routers, the first being a Thomson, a Sagecom, a BT Home Hub 5A and the latest a Plusnet branded BT router. 

The old ones have gradually broken - worn out after long faithful usage.  I have recently been able to acquire four newish BT Home Hub 5B routers to replace to replace the old routers, running from my main Plusnet router which is not very old.  It seemed to be an easy enough exercise but .....

I soon discovered the Home Hub 5 routers do not allow me to change the I.P. Address which I have always had to do before with the old variety of routers,  and of course they clash with one another.

I would be extremely grateful if anyone could suggest some sort of work around.  I have tried all the alternatives like the obvious WiFi signal extenders / boosters but with my geography they just do not work.  The only solution is a wired ethernet solution connecting something like a WiFi router - I used an ethernet port on one of them for the television for instance.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated or if there is a BT engineer out there who knows of a work-around for the restriction on changing the IP address, so much the better !

Many thanks.

2 REPLIES 2
MisterW
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 15,081
Thanks: 5,732
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Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: Daisy-chaining routers

I soon discovered the Home Hub 5 routers do not allow me to change the I.P. Address which I have always had to do before with the old variety of routers, 

I've not used one myself, but I'd be surprised if that's the case. You MAY have to change the DHCP range at the same time even though (I sssume?) you have the DHCP server disabled.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

JakTheBiscuit
Rising Star
Posts: 175
Thanks: 28
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎10-08-2007

Re: Daisy-chaining routers

The routers may come with a default IP address but I would expect it to be configurable.

This image shows the ip address under Network Settings-> LAN .