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I'm sure we've all come across the same problem. There are bits of your house that wifi doesn't quite reach or at least is patchy. In my case the dead spot is literally in my bedroom on my side of the bed. I'm not kidding! If I simply shift to my wifes side it picks up fine, not great but you can get online.

The main reason for this is basically the location of my router. It is at the front of my house as that's where my phone line comes in. So the signal in my lounge and my front garden is spectacular but the back of the house suffers as a result.

Now I know that there are numerous solutions for extending your wifi range which can range from reasonable coinage to pricey. But I'm a geek, and it got me thinking. If like me you get a new router each time you renew your broadband contract then you'll have a stash of them. So, can you reprogram a wireless router to become a wireless extender? Well it seems you can.

Now this is not as elegant as dedicated extenders, the reason being that you still need to be wired to your primary router but trust me, if you can get over that it does work.

I'm a BT customer so my stash of routers are HomeHubs. I opted for the last one that I decommissioned which is the HomeHub 5 for this experiment.

So basically you plug it in, turn it on and factory reset it (using the pinprick button on the back). I then positioned the hub at the back of my lounge, on top of a tall bookshelf and linked it to my main hub using a 10 metre ethernet cable which you simply plug into one of the ports on the back.

I then connected to the wireless network for the second hub and accessed its admin page (192.168.1.254) and proceeded to the advanced settings.

I then followed this handy little guide on the YouTube's.

Now I have a second wifi network in the centre of my house and it works great! I'm sure that this would work with other brands of router but I thought it would be fun to share that this is something you can do.

Anyone else fancy a try?

Author

Paul Wright

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