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?
“Not Compatible” usually just means “We’re extracting a monthly fee from you to use out provided router”. Most likely, if you were to poke around, you could turn your ISP router/modem into a dumb modem and disable the inbuilt router, then connect your (better) wifi router to that.
Official guidance from Verizon is you can use your own router as a router, by setting your Verizon router as a modem only, then connecting it to the WAN port on your router. See e.g. https://kb.netgear.com/31100/How-do-I-set-up-my-Orbi-system-to-work-with-Fios
Unofficially, it’s fine. You can just use your router. The modem is in the white box on the wall (the ONT) with fibre on one end and ethernet on the other. I’ve been running my router directly to the ONT for 3 years without issue. It just works fine.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. I appreciate the link too.
It probably is compatible with your service. If you buy your own modem then you can use that router. You’ll avoid the monthly fee.
I bet it’s compatible and they don’t get punished for lying. All they have to say is “Oh, it looks like it IS compatible after all.”
is it a wireless router? You could turn it into an access point and extend your wifi.
make it a separate, unconnected and open router to troll your neighbors/wardrivers
Trolling people sounds interesting. Is there any way to have them auto-navigate to a rickroll upon connecting?
Potentially you could serve them a captive portal. I thought about this a while back, basically to create a sneakernet WiFi network where people could connect directly to a landing page that had my music for download, for example.
That would be a great thing to setup at an airport (somewhere people sit around for hours, bored). So long as it’s done to advertise your music and not to be malicious. I’m assuming your music isn’t “Nails on a chalkboard” or “A baby crying”, that could both be music and malicious.
I think it’s rather pleasant. Kind of chilled out electronic. https://music.knova.net
But yeah, no desire to be malicious. There is enough of that in the world.
Gl.net make these great portable routers, I could see someone using one for this purpose.
Captive portal?
I’ll look into that, thanks.
Captive portal?
You could look into flashing a different firmware like DD-Wrt or Fresh Tomato. I use my second router to connect everything at my desk
I’ve never heard of these before. I’ll have to check them out. Thanks for the suggestion.
If you have anywhere in your home with poor Wi-Fi signal, you could set up the router in bridge mode to effectively act as a range extender. Just make sure to disable DHCP on the 2nd router or it will wreak havoc!
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.
When I upgraded to a mesh system a while back, I turned my old router into a dedicated access point just for playing VR games wirelessly on my PC. Performance improved noticably once it didn’t have to compete with the regular house WiFi traffic.
I assume you had a hardline from the VR router to the central router? Otherwise wouldn’t the wireless communication between the VR router and the central router be in the same competition as the VR headset was before?
Most/all of the data transfer in their case wouldn’t be hitting the regular router; the spare router would only be acting as a go-between from the PC to the VR headset
Oh, so you have a main router for internet traffic (wifi access for extended router and other devices) and another router extended from it that both your VR headset and PC connect to for VR-type data communication, still providing internet to the PC with about half the bandwidth?
That’s how I’d set it up, yeah. Most VR games are gonna be local, not needing a ton of internet bandwidth
I run double firewalls.
I just don’t fully trust the ISP router, so I disabled the wifi and hooked it up to my own router. If the ISP router gets hacked, my internal network doesn’t get exposed.
Port forwarding is a bit harder, but you probably aren’t even doing that at all (and it still works anyway, it’s just an extra step).
That’s an interesting idea. How do you access the router connected to the ISP to setup port forwarding to your second router? If it’s too complicated to type out here, I’ll understand.
The easiest way would be to just bridge the ISP router if it supports that feature. To connect back to the ISP router’s webui you can setup outbound NAT on your second router (generally only available on enterprise gear). Don’t double NAT unless there’s no other option.
If you can bridge, the sky’s the limit in terms of what gear you can have on the backend. My bridged modem is directly connected to a L3 switch which links to my Proxmox cluster, and my Opnsense router exists virtually in the cluster and can be migrated freely between the machines.
Your setup sounds very interesting to me. If I wasn’t so obsessed with writing code, I would have been deep into hardware. I imagine that it will become a hobby of mine when I hit my midlife crisis. I’ll be buying up all kinds of hardware, quiting my job, and connecting everything to everything.
Homelabbing is an amazing hobby if you’re into this stuff, and you can go as far down the rabbit hole as you like :)
My lab also supports my coding endeavors since I can deploy VMs, run a local Git server, and so forth. Most of my development is done in a SPICE VDI on Proxmox.
You could probably turn it into an extended access point or something like that. You could also set it up to be used in like let’s say a lab or something like that. If possible, check what router it is and see if you can put OpenWrt or something like that on it.
If not, collecting dust in a box isn’t a bad idea either, just if you decide to take it out again to clean it thoroughly.
Custom firmware like tomato or ddwrt can be fun to just play around with and learn more about networking. I used my old router temporarily as both a wifi repeater and as a wifi receiver using custom firmware. I didn’t need it for any particular function, but it was fun to experiment with
If you’re not going to hook it up to the internet (bridging, access point, etc.), name it something funny or provocative for the neighbors.
For example, I live in a college student neighborhood with a lot of Chinese students. I have an old router that I’m going to use the network name 六四屠殺 which is Chinese for the June Fourth Massacre (the Tiananmen Square Massacre). It’s a term banned on the Chinese internet.
I feel like a good name around me would be “FreePublicWifi”. Can you get in trouble for naming it something like “[city name]WifiNetwork”?
Yes, usually falls under impersonation.
Why? seems unnecessarily rude.
Seems pretty based to spread freedom of knowledge and history in spite of an oppressive, authoritarian regime.
No point get a modem
Might be able to get a few bucks for it on craigslist or fb if it’s not too old
I may end up going this route if I can’t turn it into a wifi extender. Having some coverage on the other side of the house would be amazing.
Mesh/range extenders really suck terribly, and that cannot be overstated. If you do any streaming or gaming or video calls, don’t do that on mesh APs or range extenders. Especially if you live near other people.
Why is this? I got some free with my ISP and just have them set up so i can manually plug things like my TV or Xbox in and not have them using their wifi.
Explained well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW4wT7gob7s
My kids would be the ones benefiting from the range extender and they’d only be watching YouTubeKids on their tablets. I don’t think they’d notice any issues with latency assuming that the buffer is able to load faster than the videos play. Thoughts?
I can’t provide guarantees without datasheets, floor plans, etc. Not practical on Lemmy lol. Doesn’t hurt you to try though. If that doesn’t pan out, there are plenty of DIY videos on running cable, it’s cheap and easy.
I’m legit scared to put holes in my walls; I’m afraid that I’ll make a hole, realize that I can’t use the hole (blocked, pipes in the way, etc.), and now I have a hole in my wall. I’m far more likely to pay someone else to do it - but I will at least watch a video on the topic, just to see if maybe it’s easier than I think it is.
You could make a pretty nifty looking hat
Maybe for Halloween, I could be “Internet Man”.
