[SOLVED] old router, new devices

[vistagamer6969]

Hello everybody!
Today I found another interesting ancient piece of technology: zyxel P-870HW-51a v2
Now I'm at a village and got a Huawei b311s-220 from Orange on a contract for 1 more year. The signal strenght of this thing is horrible: I've got 2 or maybe 3 signal lines on my laptop if I move like 3 meters behind it without any walls and stuff blocking.
Now here comes my idea: to connect both of them thru an ethernet cable and overwall have a bigger signal radius.
It seems like I got it to work by going into zyxel's settings and disabling DHCP but when I try to connect to it on my laptop it says something about security and that it uses an older 128 bit encryption method but seems to be working just fine.
Now when I try to connect my phone to the older router it just doesn't work. Just says "timed out" and nothing happens.
Is there anything I can do to fix this?
Note:I don't really care about the older stuff not supporting 10/100/1000 (it's just 10/100 btw) because I can't really get past 70mbps when I have a good day sooo...

 

[kanewolf]

Hello everybody!
Today I found another interesting ancient piece of technology: zyxel P-870HW-51a v2
Now I'm at a village and got a Huawei b311s-220 from Orange on a contract for 1 more year. The signal strenght of this thing is horrible: I've got 2 or maybe 3 signal lines on my laptop if I move like 3 meters behind it without any walls and stuff blocking.
Now here comes my idea: to connect both of them thru an ethernet cable and overwall have a bigger signal radius.
It seems like I got it to work by going into zyxel's settings and disabling DHCP but when I try to connect to it on my laptop it says something about security and that it uses an older 128 bit encryption method but seems to be working just fine.
Now when I try to connect my phone to the older router it just doesn't work. Just says "timed out" and nothing happens.
Is there anything I can do to fix this?
Note:I don't really care about the older stuff not supporting 10/100/1000 (it's just 10/100 btw) because I can't really get past 70mbps when I have a good day sooo...

You need to see if you have the latest firmware -- version 1.01 something is listed on the support website -- https://www.zyxel.com/support/SupportLandingSR.shtml?c=gb&l=en&kbid=MD08190&md=P-870HW-51a v2
Then you need to go into the WIFI settings and change the encryption to WPA2 pre-shared key. The datasheet says it supports that.

 

[vistagamer6969]

Thank you very much. I install that firmware tomorrow and come back.

 

[vistagamer6969]

Well, it works on my phone now and on my laptop I don't see any security thing which is great!
Now 1 more question if you don't mind: I want to host a minecraft server (ik stu) to play with some friends but every time I try to do the port forwarding it does't work. It's not working because Orange limited access to this thing which is very stupid in my opinion but what if I do it on my Zyxel router? I searched online for a bit and found that I should enable "bridge mode" on the huawei one. What does that do? I see some scary warnings
"Note:

1. In bridge mode, you can only access the Internet using mobile data.
2. If you enable bridge mode when not connected to the Internet, or manually disconnect from the Internet in bridge mode, you will be logged out of the page. You will need to manually assign a static IP to your computer to log in again. "

I don't really know much about static IPs and how to set them...

 

[bill001g]

My guess would be that they are not giving you a public ip address. Check the IP you see on the wan port and compare that with what you see on sites like whatsmyip. If the ip is different the ISP is running NAT on one of there routers so you and other customers are sharing a public IP.

From what I can tell you get your internet over mobile broadband from a cell tower ? It is extremely common to not have public ip on cell networks since they were designed for portable devices and not hosting servers.

 

[vistagamer6969]

My guess would be that they are not giving you a public ip address. Check the IP you see on the wan port and compare that with what you see on sites like whatsmyip. If the ip is different the ISP is running NAT on one of there routers so you and other customers are sharing a public IP.

From what I can tell you get your internet over mobile broadband from a cell tower ? It is extremely common to not have public ip on cell networks since they were designed for portable devices and not hosting servers.

makes sense...
but what is bridge mode for? it works without it but on many sites that i looked on how to connect both routers together they say to enable

 

[bill001g]

There are 2 types of bridge mode. The first in effect make the device into a media converter. A common example would be a cable modem that coverts from coax to ethernet. I am not so sure you can bridge a mobile broadband network to ethernet. They make USB type modems but these generally require drivers. I have never seen a bridge ability on a mobile broadband modem so I can't say what it does.

The other form of bridge mode is called client-bridge. It allows a device to appears a end user machine. It is in effect a wifi nic adapters you connect via ethernet. You might be able to take you second router and use it as a client bridge to the first. Not sure what benefit that would provide. You generally only do that when the computer does not have a wifi card and the only way to connect to the main router is via wifi.

 

[vistagamer6969]

A common example would be a cable modem that coverts from coax to ethernet. I am not so sure you can bridge a mobile broadband network to ethernet. They make USB type modems but these generally require drivers.

yea well i simply have a router but instead of coax cable I have a SIM slot, just 1 ethernet port and a RJ-11 port (i think) but I don't know why it's here
(i have a smaller coax cable connector but it's used by the antenna to get better 4g signal i guess)

 

[kanewolf]

yea well i simply have a router but instead of coax cable I have a SIM slot, just 1 ethernet port and a RJ-11 port (i think) but I don't know why it's here
(i have a smaller coax cable connector but it's used by the antenna to get better 4g signal i guess)

Cellular devices don't provide public IP addresses. You won't be host a server.

 

[vistagamer6969]

Thank you guys!