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Bill123456's avatar
Bill123456
Follower
Nov 23, 2020

How to connect two Orbi Routers in different buildings to extend Wifi coverage

I currently have an RBR50 router with 2 satellites in my house.  Works great!  I just purchased the RBR10 router with 2 satellites for use in my 3500 sq ft outbuilding.  The outbuilding is metal and the house Wifi signal does not penetrate into the building.  To get around this I ran an ethernet cable 125 feet underground in conduit from the house to the to the outbuilding.  Now I am struggling to add the new RBR10 router to my existing network to finally get some WiFi in the outbuilding.  

 

The RBR10 works when connected directly to the ehternet cable provided by my Inernet Service provider when I set it up in the house.  I went through the initial setup without any issues.  Now I cannot figure out how to turn off DHCP and setup a static IP address for use on my existing RBR50 network.  Also, when I take the router out to the outbuilding and plug it into the ehternet port nothing happens.  It does not get onto the existing RBR50 network.  But if I plug in my laptop computer in the outbuilding it works just fine.

 

Any solutions out there to get WiFi working in another building?  One more thing that makes this more challenging is I only have one ethernet cable avaible from my internet service provider.  I tried hooking it up to a little 5-port switch to split the signal between the house and the outbuilding but that did not work.  The switch killed the internet signal.

 

  

1 Reply

  • antinode's avatar
    antinode
    Guru
    Nov 23, 2020

    > [...] Now I cannot figure out how to turn off DHCP and setup a static
    > IP address for use on my existing RBR50 network. [...]

     

       Visit http://netgear.com/support , put in your model number (RBR10),
    and look for Documentation.  Get the User Manual.  Look for "Use the
    router as a WiFi access point".

     

       Terminology: A "static" address is configured on the device itself.
    What you configure on a (DHCP server on a) router is a reserved dynamic
    address, not a static address.  Either one should fix the address of a
    device, but some implications are different, so it helps to know which
    you mean.  Most likely, reserving an address on the main router (RBR50)
    for the RBR10-as-WAP would cause the least trouble.


    > [...] One more thing that makes this more challenging is I only have
    > one ethernet cable avaible from my internet service provider. [...]

     

       That's typical.


    > [...] I tried hooking it up to a little 5-port switch to split the
    > signal between the house and the outbuilding but that did not work. The
    > switch killed the internet signal.

     

       "killed" might be an exaggeration, but connecting multiple devices to
    your ISP connection would tend to leave at most one of them working
    properly.  You can add a switch on the LAN side of a (NAT) router;
    generally not on its WAN/Internet side (that is, directly connected to
    your ISP).