What's the point of having another router?

livingcoder@lemmy.austinwadeheller.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 17 points –

I once bought a router to use for my internet when I moved into my new house just to find out that it "wasn't compatible" with Verizon's service. I still have it (because I'm terrible about returning things). Is there any point in keeping it? Is there anything fun or interesting that I could do with it?

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A wifi extender would be awesome! Thanks for the suggestion.

Best is actually to connect the two with a cable, otherwise you lose a lot of bandwidth.

I hope it's not too terrible, purely over wifi. Maybe when my son gets older and wants to play games on his own computer, I'll pipe a line over to the other side of the house for him. I don't think his sister is going to care enough about computers to want a direct line to the internet, but if she does then I'll do it for her too.

It effectively cuts it by half.

That makes sense. I just hope that it's good enough for YouTube.

Youtube 4k is only 20mbps - any pair of routers with better than 802.11n will do just fine. n is technically 300mbps, but try to push that through a wall or three and it drops to nothing real quick.

That sounds promising. Thanks for the numbers. I'm planning to put the second router under their rooms, so I would think that one set of flooring shouldn't be too bad.

I did this with my old router and as others have said it effectively cuts throughput in half. Depending on your usage though it might not be a big deal. I only connected mine so I could get a signal in the front yard. It's fine for surfing the web or watching YouTube

If we can at least do that (do simple web crawling and watching YouTube), that'd be enough for me. Thanks for sharing your experience.