Can i hook up a wireless router to a 2wire dsl router

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I have a 2Wire wireless router that came with my ATT DSL connection. Now I am looking to buy a Dlink Wireless router. I noticed that DLink doesn't have the telephone cable input that the 2Wire router has. Dlink has the ethernet input. So how do I hook up Dlink?
Can I just put a ethernet cable from one of the 2Wire ports to Dlink? Will it work?

The reason I would like to do this is to use the faster wireless modem and access the security services Securespot 2.0 D-link provides.

Thanks in advance.
MA
 
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Yes, you can probably run your D-Link router off one of the ethernet ports on your AT&T router. You will probably have to configure your D-Link as an "access point" first, otherwise, it may try to assign it's own IP addresses and will probably conflict with the AT&T.

I'm running a Belkin wifi router in another room as an access point off the ethernet of a D-Link wifi router by the modem. Not only do I have an access point on an alternate channel in the case of heavy interference, everything behind the second router is behind a second hardware firewall.

Keep in mind, not all routers may do this and your ethernet and wifi speeds will slow to however fast the slowest router is. Also, it might just be easier to take the D-Link back and get something with an input for your DSL modem.
 
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Wildwell is half right.

First, the reason the 2Wire has a telephone cable and the D-link doesn't is that the 2wire is a wireless router and a DSL modem in one. The d-link is just a wireless router. You will need to use both together or buy a different dsl modem/router.

Second, there are two ways to handle this. The easiest is to do as wildwell suggests and plug the d-link into the 2wire leaving everything else as is. The d-link will connect itself automatically and anything you connect to it will probably work. There's a small chance that the D-Link and the 2Wire will use the same internal IP address space(the same subnet i.e. 192.168.X.X), which would cause problems, but you might get lucky.

But even if everything goes fine, you'll still have a situation which can lead to issues depending on what you're using your internet connection for. Having your computers behind 2 routers generally leads to problems in high badwidth applications like gaming and any port forwarding you might need to do. You'll also see some reduced speed and higher latency, since your traffic is being actively routed through two routers.

The cleanest solution requires a bit of work on the 2wire and d-link. Since you want to use all the features of the d-link, the best thing to do is to shutdown all of the router functions of the 2wire. Turn off the wireless and all of the router functions. You want to set the 2wire into a modem only mode. This casues it to act as a simple modem doing the initial translation on the DSL connection. The caviate is that you need to set up the d-link to login to the DSL network and get your IP address assignment. Most DSL providers use a protocol called PPPoe for this. You may be able to figure out your login by poking around in the 2wire's settings, but you pobably used it when you first set it up, unless you had it professionally installed. After the 2wire is in modem mode, you need to setup d-link to do all the work, which means poking around in the D-link prefrences.

This is how I've set up my home network, but if that's all too much heavy lifting :sweat: , I suggest going with your first option and dealing with any problems as they come up. If you have a techie friend looking for a small challenge, set this one in fornt of them. Bribe them with food and drink. Always works for me. 😛
 
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Started looking for info on this topic and this thread was the most helpful so I thought I'd update it with some info I learned today with some help from and AT&T tech.

I was trying to add a Cisco E3000 (aka Linksys) router to my home network where a 2WIRE 1701HG gateway was already was already handling my internet connection.

I switched the one computer I had cabled from the 2WIRE to the E3000 and ran a 2nd cable from the E3000 to the 2Wire gateway. I let the Connections software do its thing. Then the problems started. I couldn't access the internet. The 2WIRE would redirectly me to an internal page saying it had detected a "router behind a router" condition and asked if I wanted to resolve it. Basically it said it was going to move the E3000 to the DMZ Plus zone and "share" the one internet address it was getting from AT&T. I didn't like that idea.

So, I figured that part of the problem was that the E3000 had defaulted to having NAT on. So I turned that off. At this point I ran out of time so I pulled out the E3000 until I could do more research. I returned my home network to it's original condition. It wouldn't let me access the internet. I rebooted the 2Wire by pulling the power plug for 10 secs. I rebooted the computer now cabled directly to the 2Wire. The 2WIRE kept complaining (paraphasing here) "Although your connection seems to be fine now, you have a cache problem if you're seeing this page. Please reboot your browser to resolve the problem"

I repaired the connection so it would dump the associated caches. Rebooted everything again -full power down and restart. No go.

So I called AT&T tech support and they were very helpful.
Turned out I need to do a factory reset on my 2WIRE. Using a pen, hold the reset button in on the back of the unit for 30 secs. Now log back in and redo your settings. For me this was: Under Broadband catagory, set connection type to PPPoE, enter email address as login, enter pwd and confirm it, then save.

I was good to go.

The tech gave me some helpful advice I'm going to try out tonight. First, there's a way to see all the settings in the 2WIRE without having to tab around through it's interface. Enter the main 2WIRE setup address into your browser and add /mdc like this: http://192.168.1.254/mdc and you will see the Management and Diagnostic Console. Now there's a list of links on the left side. If you go down to the Advanced - Configure Services you will see an option to turn off the router portion of the gateway and make it into a "dumb" modem. The instructions at the top of the page tell how to reconnect to the 2WIRE once it's in this mode, but the tech told me that I'd need to do a factory reset to get the gateway back into "smart" mode.

After that, I'd need to go into my E3000 and configure it to be my primary router. I'll have to see if I can find a menu to allow me to: set PPPoE, and set my login/pwd. I'll have to remember to turn NAT back on.

Oh, one warning. The E3000 has a guest account option that will allow guests to access the internet wirelessly but not connect or use anything else on your personal network. I'd put a new pwd on this and thought I was good. But when I viewed my wireless network list from my notebook, the guest account was not only showing as unsecured, it was not pwd'ed, and I could access other computers shared info on my network. So until I research this further, the guest account feature is OFF.



 
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Ok, E3000 router is running my home network now. This is what I did to set the 2WIRE into bridge mode:

Set ATM Circuit Id VPI: 0, VCI: 35, Bridged LLC (They were already set to this)
PVC Search: Disabled (Couldn't find much info on this; just that others say it needs to be off.)
Connection Type: Direct IP (previous setting PPPoE)
Wireless OFF (the 1701HG has 802.11g and I didn't want it conflicting with the E3000's radios)

In the MDC (as described in the previous post) I turned off routing.

(For now, I've left the 2Wire's firewall on -at least I suspect it's still working in bridge mode. If/when i get to the point I need to do port forwarding, I'll likely need to set the 2WIRE to DMZplus mode and let all the traffic forward to the E3000 and its firewall and control the traffic there. But for now, with my simple network its working fine with possibly dual firewalls running.)

For the the E3000 I set it up as follows:
Connection Type: PPPoE, with login/pwd I previously used on the 2WIRE
NAT On
DHCP On
SPI On (Stateful Packet Inspection - the E3000's firewall)
For the dual radios I setup as follows:
5 Ghz, SSID: CoolName5, Wireless-N only, 40 Mhz channel width, WPA2 personal (this security mode is required for N only)
2.4 Ghz, SSID: CoolName2.4, Mixed Mode (to handle G and N traffic), Auto channel width (default is 20 Mhz), WPA2/WPA mixed mode.


Final thoughts:
The E3000 seems flawless so far for connection with WPA/WPA2. Before I only had WEP so this is a nice improvement in security. At the back of the house I was getting 54 Mb/s on my old laptop's G modem. Now using a Cisco AE1000 USB dual band wireless-N connected to my laptop via its dock, I get 48 to 216 Mbs with an average of 81 Mbs on the 5 Ghz band when connecting to the E3000 router -and not a single disconnect so far (I used to get 3 or 4 per day).

The E3000 already has a firmware update available with bug fixes so I installed that with no problems.
The Connections software had an update but it wouldn't install -I guess I'd already made too many settings changes directly on the E3000's setup (192.168.1.1) webpages. Although it could just be that I did have NAT and DHCP off at the time and maybe that confused the sofware when I tried to install it (my computer was using DHCP at the time and getting a whacked out IP address from my ISP -so I can't be too hard on the software. Once I'd manually set my computer to IP 192.168.1.50 and gateway 192.168.1.1 I was able to get back into the E3000 and turn NAT and DHCP back on. At this point the connections software probably would have installed, but I liked working directly with the E3000's setup pages better.)

There seems to be no mention of the Guest access feature in the direct settings of the E3000 so I can only guess that this was some simplified gimmick for the techno-challenged crowd that was added to the Connections software. Perhaps Guest mode was to be the 2.4 Ghz band and the Private network the 5 Ghz band, with separate passwords on each -I suppose I'll never know.

The E3000 also has the option to run a USB external HDD as a NAS, so I'll probably attach one soon and see how that works out.

Overall I was impressed with the number of configuration and settings options for the E3000. It easily handles my current needs and leaves me with plenty of options for the future.
 
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After further usage, I've found I'm having problems accessing any shared info on my local network. Since this used to work before, I don't believe it's a configuration issue. I believe the E3000 is blocking or not properly relaying the necessary protocols for file and printer sharing. I've a post over on Cisco's forums here:

http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/Can-t-access-network-shares-with-E3000/m-p/331134/highlight/false#M173573

No response from them yet. I did the live chat with one of their techs, but as soon as he realized it wasn't a connection issue he dumped the call quickly, telling me to contact Microsoft. Clearly his training was limited or he was trying to deny that the Cisco router could be the problem.
 
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I may have to eventually switch everything around, take my 2WIRE out of bridge mode, and change up the E3000 to be an AP as described in that article fihart mentioned.

Still it bugs me that the E3000 just doesn't work as it should. Every device on my home network is connected by wire or wirelessly directly to the E3000, and all have an IP address of the form 192.168.1.x that the E3000 hands to them via DHCP. So why the E3000 should be disrupting all access to the common workgroup is very aggrevating. Well, I'll have to wait a week or so until I have time to work on it again. Maybe I can find a solution or a firmware patch from Cisco by then.
 
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Just updated my Cisco forums thread. The E3000 still doesn't properly handle file sharing on my typical home LAN. It seems to jam the default Workgroup until you go into its settings under Storage -> Administration and change its workgroup to something else like Workgroup2. At that point, I can get one computer with Vista to see some shares, but the others are still running WinXP SP3 and only see an empty Workgroup and maybe, sometimes, the Workgroup2 with the E3000 in it.

But at least I now can definitely show that the E3000 is causing these file sharing problems. I've contacted Cisco support, but except for their Live Chat people who only have basic connection knowledge, Cisco seems determined to close off all other avenues of contacting them -including by email. Clearly they have a poorly tested product, and yet there doesn't seem to be a way to open a bug report or a service ticket with them -unless perhaps you use their paid help service.

In a previous post I'd considered switching the E3000 to an AP, but now I don't think even that would work. It's a shame, but I may just have to look into returning the product if I can. The only other thing I can think of is that the E3000 EXPECTS to have a storage HDD connected to it and behaves poorly when it doesn't. Maybe connecting an external USB HDD to it will help. It's a shame that I paid this much for a router that can't even route locally. I end up walking around with an external HDD or a flash drive to transfer files between computers.
 
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While the parent firm Cisco has been horrible to deal with -- probably because they mostly work on service contracts with big clients, the Linksys people should be helpful on a consumer product. As you've noted they have a user forum which may be of some help.
 
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Awesome! Thank you for this post! Last night I used this info to configure a NETGEAR WNDR3400 wireless router to my 2wire 1701hg router/modem. It didn't work right away. I had to do several reboots. But at the end, I followed most of what you did and was able get the bridging working, and I now have excellent wireless performance and range in my house. I imagine I would have had 0 chance of figuring this out myself.
Thanks again!!
 
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can anyone help me set up an ARRIS cable modem (also a wireless router) to a 2Wire 1701HG Gateway? I DO NOT recieve wireless signal in my room downstairs so I'm hoping to use the 2Wire as a form of wireless signal extender using an ethernet cable to connect the two. I read somewhere online that this is possible however i dont know how to set up the 2wire settings in general. please help! or atleast tell me if this isnt possible.
 
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From what I can figure out, two problems arise. The usual configuration would have you plug the Ethernet from the ARRIS into the WAN port of your router, but the 2Wire only has a phone jack for the WAN side. The second has to do with whether your ARRIS is a router or just a modem. The easy way tell is whether it has more than one Ethernet port. If it's more than one, it's a router (good news) if not, it's just a modem and you'll need a real router.

Assuming the former is true, I found this how-to

It's not for the exact same model, but it may work the same for yours. Make sure your firmware is up to date and maybe you'll get lucky.

Hope that helps,
 
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