Concrete home - poor WiFi concerns

[lagagnon]

We have been using old Shaw equipment for about 10 years - a Hitron router and a Motorola PVR. Both pieces are now obsolete and the PVR is non-functional. 

Rogers are replacing them with an Ignite Gen 2 Router and an Xi One TV box. I am about to setup the new equipment. However, I am concerned about getting WiFi throughout our house -we had WiFi issues previously because:

     we live in a rather unique, small 2-story Art Deco home which is constructed from concrete. Even the interior walls and floor are concrete with lots of rebar. The main router is in the corner of one room on the upper floor (and cannot easily be changed). In the past I have had to run Ethernet cable from the router downstairs to a WAP (wireless access point router) in order to get a decent network signal to our TV and WiFi signals on the lower floor. I also have a small repeater in the furthest upper room.

But now I am unsure how to connect the downstairs WAP to the system (it is not Shaw or Rogers equipment). It is set to an old 192.168 network and the new Rogers modem is a 10.0 network. 

If I am unable to get the WAP working are their Rogers extra WiFi "pods" that might work?

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

[mdk]

@lagagnon wrote: It is set to an old 192.168 network and the new Rogers modem is a 10.0 network. 

A "factory reset" of your WAP should make it send a DHCP-request to the cable-modem, and should return a "10.0.xx.yy" IP-address for the WAN interface.

Maybe, even a simple "power-off" (disconnect the power-cord) and "power-on" will induce your WAP to send that DHCP-request, and receive a new IP-address.

[mdk]

@lagagnon wrote:  a Hitron router ... Ignite Gen 2 Router ...  I am concerned about getting WiFi throughout our house ...

I think that the latest XB7/XB8 cable-modems offer better WiFi than the Hitron.  YMMV

Note that your own router can still hand-out "192.168" IP-addresses to the devices that connect (wired/wireless) to it. 

After the "reset" of your device, it will send packets with a "10.0." IP-address to the Rogers/Shaw cable-modem.

[lagagnon]

The install of the new Ignite router went fine and we now have Internet via both WiFi and ethernet on our upstairs devices.

However,  the new Ignite router will not recognize the Asus router as a WAP. I have reset that Asus router, unplugged it, reconnected to the ethernet cable from the upstairs Ignite router but cannot get the new router to give the WAP a valid IP address. The ethernet cables running from the WAP to our TV and to our new XiONE box are not getting any network signal.

Any suggestions how to properly set up that Asus router as a WAP attached to the Ignite router via ethernet cable is greatly appreciated.

[lagagnon · Accepted solution]

OK, problems solved. It took a couple of reboots of the Ignite router and then waiting at least an hour for an IP address and I also reset all my ethernet cable connections, so I am not sure what actually worked, but we now have Internet, some WiFi and the XiONE box working.