Never throw away your old routers. The new routers may offer you high performance and speed, yet there are some ways your old routers can help and this includes improving new network, extending wireless coverage, providing network authentication, assisting in providing public WIFI or enabling site-to-site connections for VPN and secure remote VPN connections.
Giving Old Tech New Life: Routers
Most of these ideas include moving your old router around to serve different purposes. Nevertheless, some make use of neat features, which replacement firmware projects offer for the famous WRT series from vendors like Linksys. However, all ideas can be a bit helpful and will let you save lots of money.
Extend Coverage Through the Use of Old Routers As AP
Even if wireless routers are made to connect and distribute internet connection, they may be used for their WIFI capabilities. In other terms, you may use old routers as AP or access point rather than wireless routers. If you have small network with a single wireless router, it can double your own wireless coverage and it is free of charge.
Make It a Repeater to Take Signal Further
If there’s another way to use old routers, it’s to extend WIFI footprint. You can use it as a repeater. Rather than running an Ethernet cable out to an access point, the repeater gets its network connection through listening to airwaves and retransmitting WIFI signals between the current wireless network as well as the users out of the coverage area. It’s great if you cannot or do not want to run some wires. Even if this technique will not let you run cables to extend coverage range, it does need flashing your router with the replacement firmware. The main reason behind it is that routers do not come with repeater feature. If you have supported routers, you may use Tomato or DD-WRT firmware replacement.
Use Old Routers As a Wireless Bridge
You can convert your old routers into wireless bridge if you have other network devices or computers that should be connected to the network yet only have Ethernet port and are not close enough to the routers. When it comes to bridge mode, old routers would communicate with new router through airwaves. Any computer that’s connected to the Ethernet ports of old routers would be like they’re connected wirelessly with new routers.
Turn Old Routers Into A Hotspot
You can convert old router into another hotspot gateway if you have a business. Even if you can plug in the regular wireless router to provide wireless internet, you must implement hotspot features. The captive portal makes the users see the ads or disclaimer or make payments before getting an internet access.
Offer the VPN Connections or Connect the Offices Together
Another provided feature by several firmware replacements is built-in VPN servers and clients. This allows you to set up the router for a more secure remote connection, so you may access services and files or secure WIFI hotspot connections. In addition to that, if you have different locations, you may securely connect them through the internet.
How to Put an Old Router to Good Use
Rather than just throwing away your old router, I hope we gave you a few good ideas that could come in handy for how to use your old router. If you do decide to throw them out, please consider recycling or filling out our recycling form to responsibly recycle the routers for you.
