If Like me, you have a home with more than one router, This may interest you. Because I can’t get broadband here, there is only one company in our village that provides fibre and they won’t provide it to our house because they’re useless. Accordingly, I have two choices: Starlink or 5G.
We are fortunate enough to have the village 5G mast within sight of our house. I bought a second hand 5G router from eBay last time I was in the UK and brought it with me to Spain. Imagine my surprise when I plugged it in and realized…that I could get download speeds vastly in excess of those available on Starlink and local fibre.
I’ve written extensively elsewhere on the subject of 5G, so we’re not going to that here, but the router, great as it is, is not WiFi 6 or WiFi 7 and I like to keep up to date.
Accordingly, the 5G router simply feeds my GL-iNet Flint router’s WAN input And the GL-iNet provides my internal 192.168.1.x subnet. That’s fine, but I’ve mounted Flint near the front door because that’s where my UPS system and the 5G router are. That covers the living room, which is quite big, also the outside porch area, and that’s about it.
We live in a rural cave home and, accordingly, many of the rooms are effectively under rock – Indeed, some of the walls are made of sedimentary rock. As you can imagine, WiFi doesn’t travel too well through that. So just like the situation in my last cavehome, I have multiple routers. That is, I would normally be encouraged to put the routers into repeater mode..
But in fact, I generally use one of the LAN inputs to these routers and put the router in “router mode” (usually the default mode) but (importantly with DHCP turned off so that there is only one DHCP server in the house: my GL-iNet Flint).
I have LOTS of IoT devices which I’ve written about elsewhere and recently noticed that one device in my office simply would not connect to the SSID “myoffice” – sitting on my Comfast router. I spent days getting to the bottom of this. In the end, having discussed this with various friends and my favorite AI, it turned out that this particular router, the one in my office, Had DHCP turned on, meaning that there were two sources of DHCP for my various devices.
Some weren’t bothered, others were. This was a devil to track down. I went into the Comfast router settings and turned DHCP off, made sure that was saved and rebooted the router. On powering up again, DHCP was back on. I had several attempts at sorting this to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The instructions could not have been clearer: “Select router mode” with a tick box and underneath that, “Turn on/off DHCP” with another tick box.
Except that no matter what I did, it simply wouldn’t work. This led me temporarily to use a cheap Chinese repeater I had lying around the office until I remembered I had an old Mikrotik router which turned out to be a winner – I’ve written about that elsewhere and from time to time, I write about Gl-iNet routers.
ONES to Watch Out For
The router that caused me all the problems was a Comfast CF-WR621AX-V2. The label on the bottom also refers to the router as AX3000. On consulting the oracle, I noted that umpteen users say that Comfast support is virtually non-existant – so I sent the company off a detailed email and 24 hours later – on a Saturday – what SEEMED like a helpful offer suggesting that if no firmware update exists, “we can discuss suitable replacement hardware”.. excited? SURE I was – and then… nothing… that’s 9 days ago. Two emails later – zilch – I’m not holding my breath.
