I have a 3 room apartment (Living room + 2 Bedrooms). Since we’re only 2 people, we made the second bedroom into a home office. We have a nice setup there with a very big desk, docking station for Dell laptops, HP All In One printer and a queen size bed, in case we have guests over, or if we ever (god forbid [girlfriend’s addition]) fight (which I’ll always be to blame for [girlfriend’s addition]) 😉
In our house, we have Verizon FIOS as our Internet Service Provider, and we use their wireless router to have Internet all over the place. The router they provide is pretty decent and we installed it in the living room, but the wireless signal is insanely low in the office. I decided to make it better, by using another – stronger – router as an Access Point.
Setup Cisco Linksys E3000 Router as an Access Point
Access Point is a device (in our case – Linksys E3000 router) that allows wireless devices to connect to a wired network using Wi-Fi. The new setup is pretty simple. The Low-Signal Verizon router is located in the living room, and the Linksys E3000 is connected to the Verizon router via LAN cable. Since the Linksys E3000 has a stronger and better signal strength, we will use it as a wireless router and will connect to it in our home office.
In order to make it happen, follow these 6 steps:
- Use a LAN cable to connect the Linksys router to your comouter (use the regular 4 LAN ports, not the yellow “Internet” port).
- Use your web browser in order to access your Router’s Control Panel (Usually by going to 192.168.1.1). The default username and password are “admin” for username, “admin” for password (without the “”). If you can’t access the Router’s Control Panel, reset the router’s settings by pressing the Reset button for 10 seconds. Obviously, if you reset your router, you are going to lose all the settings.
- Go to “Setup” and then “Basic Setup”. Change the default IP Address (192.168.1.1) to a free IP Address in your existing LAN. If your LAN’s IP structure is 192.168.1.x, change it, for example, to 192.168.1.55. If you’re LAN’s IP structure is 10.0.0.x, change it, for example, to 10.0.0.14. Make sure the address is free by accessing the main router. If you want, you can assign and reserve a static IP to the Linksys E3000 in your main router’s settings.
- Change “DHCP Server” from “enabled” to “disabled”.
- Save settings and reboot router.
- It’s now safe to unplug the router from your computer, and plug the Linksys E3000 (regular LAN port, not the yellow “Internet” port) to any free LAN port in your main router.
Congratulations! Your Linksys E3000 is now acting as an Access Point. Don’t forget to setup all the wireless settings in the router’s wireless settings page.
