Configuring Two Wireless Routers with One Ssid (Network Name) at Home for Free Roaming

When we moved into the new house and setup the new home office a few years back, I posted about wiring the house for wired Cat-6 ethernet. I've never liked or trusted wireless, so when we started building the place it was always in the plan to wire everything and focus on speed.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Wii is wireless, the iPad and iPhones are wireless, the Windows Phone 7 is wireless, my wife's laptop is wireless, and it's all slow. It's slow because I'm using the standard Verizon (now Frontier) FIOS wireless router to cover all corners of a two story house. Over the last few weeks it's been especially irritating as the wife has moved her laptop into another room and I've started watching streaming Netflix from the corner of a room I'd never had a wireless device in.

I tried using the standard admin interface to boost the power of the wireless router a bit, but that didn't work. Then I bought an aftermarket external antenna for the router (it just screws on and replaces the standard antenna) and while that helped a little, I was still getting 1 or 2 out of 5 bars in the two rooms we used wireless devices the most. Streaming video or news (audio or video) or downloading podcasts was impossible.

I found an extra Verizon Router in my pile of tech junk while cleaning up and then got the idea to make a second wireless network upstairs. Sure, I could set it up easily with another SSID (service set identifier - a wireless network name) but that would be cheesy and my devices wouldn't roam smoothly between networks.

Here's the trick, thanks to some friends on Twitter and a little thought.

The Starting Point

In my case, I had a standard Verizon (ActionTec) router with the IP of 192.168.1.1. That's a static (non-changing) address. The router has DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) turned on, which means that this router hands out IP Addresses to my devices. It hands out those addresses in a certain range, specifically 192.168.1.2 through...