First time trying anything related to networking, and this just seemed so easy I suspect something will go wrong.
I use Optus mobile broadband at home (100GB/$70), and have been using the Huawei E5186 4G modem / wireless router. The wifi on my E5186 has been quite unreliable, with connected devices freezing and dropping out randomly.
I want to keep using the E5186 as a 4G modem to pick up the cellular data, while connecting it to another wireless router to perform the wifi distribution to my laptops. So I pulled out an old Archer D2 ADSL modem / router, put it into "wireless router mode", and just plugged an Ethernet cable from any LAN port of the E5186 into the WAN port of the Archer D2 (wifi turned off at the E5186). Surprisingly, the Archer D2 picks up the internet from the E5186, and I was able to connect my laptops to Archer D2 wifi and browse without problem.
Surely this seems too easy, and something is meant to crash? All LAN ports still work on the E5186 as well as the Archer. I was reading about the need to put E5186 into 'bridge' mode and stuff, but didn't do in this case. Am I missing something?
Thanks
It should, as you have discovered, just work. However, you may want to try bridge mode, or at very least disable DHCP allocation on one of the routers to avoid overlap/repetition.
For example: I have a router in my garage that picks up my internet. I then have wifi disabled but DHCP enabled. I have then wired that to a second router in my hallway which has wifi enabled but DHCP disabled. Therefore, all my devices use the IP addresses given by the router in garage irrespective of whether they connect by LAN to my internal wiring (to garage OR hallway router) or via wifi to the hallway router. I also changed the ip address for the router in my hallway to the same range as the garage AND I use static IP address to avoid IP mis-allocations.
If I hadn't disabled DHCP on one of the routers I may be in the situation where the two routers are giving out two different IP address ranges and therefore creating 'two' networks.
I hope that makes sense.