How to set up a Wireless Repeater

I live in a largish house where the wireless signal in room A doesnt reach room Z. What I have done is to use a spare wireless router as a switch to extend the coverage. Its simple- a CAT5 cable is stretched from a LAN port of the mother router in room A to a LAN port on the spare router placed in room Z. You'll need to figure out how to guide the cable across bariers etc. The spare router is configured as a switch- NAT is disabled because that function is handled by the mother router, DHCP is disabled on all routers because I use static internal ip addresses and the spare router is configured with an ip address in the valid range of the mother router with the mother router set as the default gateway.

After doing this, I just configured wireless on the spare router in the usual way- gave it an SSID (different from mother router), a WPA2 key and set my laptops to connect automatically when in range. Now when in room A, my laptop connects to the mother router wifi and in room Z to the spare router wifi. Theres physically only one broadband connection.

Only downside (not important for me) is that if you carry the laptop from room A to Z, the internet connection will not be seamless i.e. it'll first disconnect from mother, then detect and connect to the spare.

If cable is no go, you'll need to set up a repeater or an AP configured as a repeater. Mind you, this is not the best solution performance wise because throughput may get cut significantly. Repeaters are also called expanders and extenders.