Plug G into N for dual wireless?

[gingerjedi]

Seeing as dual band 802.11n routers are still expensive could I just plug my old 802.11g router into the N with an ethernet cable and have 2 wireless networks sharing one ADSL connection?

Anyone tried this setup?

[SimonMac]

Yes you can, not sure why you would want to though

[TykeMerc]

Yes you can, not sure why you would want to though

Yep it works. Comes in handy for a few things, obvious one is a private and a "public" network, not unknown in hotels and numerous businesses.

For home use, hmm, bit pointless since both will effectively be hanging off 1 input port on an ordinary router. Useful for testing different network types (some earlier G cards play silly beggars with N capable routers) or if you want to throttle bandwidth to some users on the second router or I suppose if you simply want to add a daft number of wireless devices or have a lot of cable ports since most user routers only have 4.

[doodab]

Not really sure why you would want to do this?

It'll "work" but they will both use the 2.4GHz band, 802.11n at full pelt will use half of the available spectrum and both will still be subject to interference from all the other stuff on there (neighbors, DECT phones etc).

[gingerjedi]

Not really sure why you would want to do this?

It'll "work" but they will both use the 2.4GHz band, 802.11n at full pelt will use half of the available spectrum and both will still be subject to interference from all the other stuff on there (neighbors, DECT phones etc).

I was under the impression that introducing an 802.11g device (smart phone and old laptop) to an N wireless network would throttle back the entire connection to 54Mbps? Is this not the case?

My phone is 1.9 GHz (I think) and SSIDER shows 2 other weak wireless devices so easy to avoid channel interference.

[doodab]

I was under the impression that introducing an 802.11g device (smart phone and old laptop) to an N wireless network would throttle back the entire connection to 54Mbps? Is this not the case?

It doesn't throttle back the whole connection to 54Mbits per-se but there is an impact compared to a pure "N" network because it has to manage around the legacy devices. On the other hand if your N network is running on the 2.4GHz band then running a 2nd (g) access point in close proximity will guarantee interference that will likely cause even worse performance degradation (it will almost certainly limit your N network to using 20MHz channels and the lack of coordinated access to the network will result in both sets of devices suffering interference from the other).

I would expect that running the single router in mixed mode would produce the best result because that will use the mechanisms designed into the standard as opposed to devices just treating each other as "interference" but the best bet is probably to try both options and see which works best. You might also be able to mitigate any problems with careful channel choice.

Edit: Of course none of this is a problem if your N devices can operate in the 5GHz band, I'm presuming they can't.

[gingerjedi]

It doesn't throttle back the whole connection to 54Mbits per-se but there is an impact compared to a pure "N" network because it has to manage around the legacy devices. On the other hand if your N network is running on the 2.4GHz band then running a 2nd (g) access point in close proximity will guarantee interference that will likely cause even worse performance degradation (it will almost certainly limit your N network to using 20MHz channels and the lack of coordinated access to the network will result in both sets of devices suffering interference from the other).

I would expect that running the single router in mixed mode would produce the best result because that will use the mechanisms designed into the standard as opposed to devices just treating each other as "interference" but the best bet is probably to try both options and see which works best. You might also be able to mitigate any problems with careful channel choice.

Edit: Of course none of this is a problem if your N devices can operate in the 5GHz band, I'm presuming they can't.

Thanks for that explanation.

I bought an N wireless dongle (trying to future proof) to plug into my desktop as I had to give up the office, the performance with my G router is pathetic (there's a single internal wall separating the G router and the PC, total distance 3m) so I was pondering an N router to bump it up a bit.

Incidentally my old Dell laptop with built in G seems fine on the G router.