We just moved into our new place and we have two Nighthawk routers from our previous place.
We have 3 floors, and our main line into the house is on the middle floor, which is where the R7000 is.
We want to have a desktop area in the basement that connects to a router placed down there, but I don't want to connect a 200ft cable and drape it along the wall all the way downstairs.
Is there a way I can have my routers hook up wirelessly as a bridge/extender? Or is this only achievable via ethernet connection?
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
You can use bridge mode for basement. Depending on your expectations and usage you may have to run a cable at some point. Bridge mode can be less than ideal in my experience.
If you don't need Wi-Fi for devices in the basement, then you can use the second R7000 as a wireless bridge. A wireless bridge connects wirelessly to the router but it can only support wired clients. You can enable wireless bridging in Advanced setup.
If, as I suspect, you need Wi-Fi for devices (e.g. for the smartphones, laptops and tablets), then the stock firmware has poor support for operation as a range extender. There is, however, good support among 3rd party firmware. And there is plenty of good firmware for the R7000. DD-WRT, Asuswrt-Merlin and Tomato are the most popular.
If installing 3rd party firmware is too daunting, then another option is to use Powerline or MoCA to connect the two routers. These technologies use A/C and coax wires, respectively, for transporting network data.
