Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Linksys wireless router config for bridge mode

This is a follow up to my previous post WiFi Router Problems - How to Improve home wireless connection .

In it I will describe how to setup a Linksys E2500 wireless router to provide 5GHZ options to wifi routers that don't support this option (like the Verizon FiOS router (Actiontec MI424WR) .

Don't plug it right away to your existing router since it will probably conflict with it, instead connect it to the power and let is load.

After about 4-5 minutes, the router should be up and running and you should plug your computer's network cable to one of the wired ports. We are going to make changed on the wireless and therefor need to be connected with a network cable, otherwise our link would drop.

Once connected, you should get an IP address from the router and the default gateway would be the linksys, you can use ipconfig to figure out the default gateway address.

Open a web browser and point it to the address, a login prompt should appear and the default credentials would be username: admin with blank password.

Once logged in you want to do the following things:

  1. Configure the E2500 to act as a wireless bridge (aka access point mode).

  2. Configure an IP address to the router that does not conflict with your existing wifi router.
  3. Disable the 2.4 GHZ service on the Linksys, we are going to use it for 5GHZ only.
  4. Define the 5GHZ wireless parameters and security.
  5. Define a password for the admin account.
  6. Once those steps are completed, you can connect your E2500 to the provider router (FiOS) and start using the 5GHZ SSID.

Here are some relevant screen shots for the various steps, fields that are highlighted in yellow should be configured:




This image is for the ip address config and the Bridge mode.






You should probably name the 5 GHZ SSID with a name that has 5 at the end, so it's easy to identify.



Wireless security is very important, use WPA2 and set a long passphrase with letters and numbers.



Finally, don't forget to change you admin password, otherwise you can be hacked in no time.

thats it, save, plug to the provider router using a network cable and you should have the 5GHZ SSID available to you.