Adding Access Point to existing home wireless network.

[jjjax64]

Hi, I am trying to help someone with adding an Linksys wap54g access point to their existing Verizon Fios home network. They currently have wireless Verizon router in their basement but parts of their house, they are not getting any reception, it's a really big house! I gave them an old Linksys Access point and had them plug it in the one of the wired connections in the part of the house that wasn't working. They went in and put in same SSID as was in their router and it looked everything was good. But, they called next day and saying that they now notice 2 wireless networks availble with same ssid, one secured and one not so looks like the Access point and the wireless router are not working together but independently.

I've been reading around and find some comflicting information where some people say they need tol be on same channel and some say they don't? I am waiting for them to get back to me so I can take a look at some more but wanted to know if this can be done. Is it just that when we setup the access point, I don't think we setup same security as router wireless settings, could that be an issue? If the channels have to match then should I go into Verizon router and change from auto to specifice channel then do same for access point and is there any prefered channehl?

Thanks for any help. Joe

 

[cajuntank]

The channels are provided so contention is not a issue. If the APs are far enough apart, then having them on the same channel is no big deal, but if there is ANY overlap, then they actually need to be on different channels. Having them set to autochannel normally takes care of this, but sometimes, you will have to hard code them. So if your Verizon is taking up channel 1 and your Linksys is also trying to use channel 1 and the signal overlaps each other, then you need to change the Linksys to channel 6 or 9, etc...
Excluding the channel variable, the problem you're running into is that they are not setup exactly the same. If they were, you probably would be ok. The machine will have a wireless profile of a SSID and security info for that profile stored on their computer/device. If there is any change (in your case, one AP has security, the other does not), then this causes confusion. Think of it like this, you have a account on two computers called admin. On one computer, the password for admin is 123; on the second computer, the password for admin is 456; why would you think you could ever log into that second computer as admin with the first computer's password of 123?

Unless you are in a wireless controller environment (like you would see in a commercial business), then all APs will operate independantly of each other. It's getting the settings to match up that offers the appearance of seamless transition between one AP to the other.

 

[jjjax64]

Thanks for the detail explanation, it helped me understand it a lot better. Will be giving it another try this week. Thanks, Joe