Bridge two router wirelessly

[vendetta858]

Hi, ive seen a lot of videos on youtube on how to extend your wireless signal by using two router and configuring one of them to act as a repeater. Those two routers have to be connected by a ethernet cable but I was wondering if it was possible to bridge those two router wirelessly, without the ethernet cable. Thank you for your answers!

[Ssoele]

It might be possible, but it depends on the router. Most routers will not support this with the default firmware however.

[vendetta858]

What third party firmware do you recommend?

[ygohome]

There is wireless bridging and then there is wireless repeater.

 

wireless bridging allows the main router and a 2nd client router to communicate without ethernet between the two.  Devices are required to be connected by ethernet to the client router.

 

I'm using a wireless bridge between my main asus n66u router running plain vanilla asus firmware and my netgear (client router) running dd-wrt.  I have my raspberry pi connected to the client router so that it can stream movies from my server that is connected to the main router.

 

Here is a link explaining how to setup such a wireless bridge for dd-wrt.  Note:  nothing special was required to be done on the main router... all the bridging setup is done on the client (my netgear).

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Bridged

 

The  disadvantage I've seen with wireless bridge between routers is that connection is not often consistent.  It is good enough for streaming HD movies, but I wouldn't use it for gaming.

 

 

wireless repeater  is kindof similar to bridging, but for me, was alot harder to setup.  In fact I never got it to work right.  It usually requires two identical routers or two routers running same firmware.  And they must be capable of acting as wireless repeaters.  Not all are capable as I understand it.  The advantage of wireless repeater over bridge is that you don't have to connect devices to the client router by ethernet.  Devices can connect to the client router via wifi.  A wireless bridge required devices to connect to the client router by ethernet.  The disadvantage to using routers in a wireless repeater setup is that the bandwidth of the client router is cut in half, because half of it is going towards communicating with the host router.  Thats how I understand wireless repeater between routers anyway.  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.  Like I said, I've never gotten wireless repeater between two different routers to ever work.