Getting more WiFi connections

I have many "smart" devices in my house. A few months back I ran into a hard limit setting on my cable modem of 10 guest connections. My solution was to add another router, so I got an el-cheapo Tenda N300 for under $20 off Amazon.

This gave me a few more connections until I tried adding my last two. Once again I cannot make any other WiFi connections.

When I query the router on it's web page I can see all the devices attached have an IP in the range of 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.15. Hey even I can see the hex digit enclosed in that range.

Is there some setting I need adjust to get more connections, or do I need a better router?

Thanks for looking!

 

Set the range of what? LOL

I'm not home with the router to check. Yes I can connect to it there (and also RTFM) but I'm not a network guy so many if the terms are Greek to me.

 

Thanks. Will check that tonight.

 

You may want to look in the manual for Bridge settings - particularly the IP POOL (start and end address) on page 56. I'm not sure, but it looks like you may want to check how many are there. Also, check the firmware updates https://tendacn.com/en/product/download/F300.html

I bring it up because I was looking at this router (as a result of your post) and it actually looks good and cheap and well documented. Can you post back as to whether you got it working in that regard?

 

Sure thing Raymond.

Up to now this box has been a champ for me. While my house us small I get signal all over, though a bit spotty outside.

It's available today from Amazon for only $18.90 making it a real good deal for something to service my "devices."

Honestly I do not trust some of these smart devices not to be sniffing out my network for black net tidbits, so I prefer to keep them all on their own network and not connected to my PC and such.

 

Spent some time swearing at the router. First the manual that seems to correspond with the router web pages is the F3V2.0 User Guide. My LAN params look like so:



which corresponded to page 49 of the manual until I tried upping the end IP from ...200 to ...250.

I might just wind up getting another unit. The "newer model" is only $49 again at Amazon. Amazon throws in 60 days free tech support.

 

Is yours an N300?? Is this not the manual http://www.tenda.cz/sites/Upload/F300/F300_UG.pdf

Edited to add: Assuming it is because that is what you had in your first post... scrolling through Section 3.6, can you find the screen shown on p 42? - showing an IP range, start and end, with user entry fields?

Edited again: Your last post is a screen shot of your router - right? What happened when you changed the ending value?

 

The first wrong thing that I noticed is: 10 guest connections.

The two routers that have run my home lan (two different internet providers) so far had two types of connections:
- home lan (password protected for family members)
- guest lan (I ALWAYS disable it, I don't have guests)

So when I see that you own devices, but for some mysterious reason you connect them using guest lan instead of home lan. That just makes the rest of the conversation irrelevant.

 

Yes screen shot is my setup. What is confusing (to me) is there seems to be two different model numbers and three different manuals for this thing. It's referenced as either N300 and F3. On the Tenda download page there are links to two different User Guides. F3V2.0 is the version that matches the screens served off my router.

Looks to me like I have 150 addresses for smart things but only 16 get served. That so sounds like a hard limit to me.

Since we have a long weekend coming up I want to use that time to complete a few more projects so I will need 2 to 3 more IP's on my network, so I went ahead and ordered another cheapie router: another Tenda, the AC1900, which has a review that specifically states "my VERY smart home regularly has over 30 devices connected at any given time. This thing's like "here, hold my beer..." and handles every connection like a champ."

Hey, I need that. $49.99 and it gets here tomorrow.

The "rest of the conversation" contains a somewhat elusive thing called a "point." Sorry you missed this, and the explanation as to why one should use a guest network for this in post #7.

Mod: personal comment deleted.

 

Hi

1. There should be no device with an address of 192.168.0.0 or 192.168.0.255

2. While an IP subnet address block of 192.168.0.0 should be ok, you should use 192.168.n.h, where "n" is a fixed number between 1 and 254, and "h" is a unique number between 1 and 254 assigned via DHCP to each network device. This will prevent potential incompatibilities with other network devices. The DHCP settings would look like the following example.

Example:

LAN IP: 192.168.1.1 <---this is the IP that will be assigned to the router (the Default Gateway)
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Start IP: 192.168.1.100
End IP: 192.168.1.250

Preferred DNS server: 192.168.1.1

3. Have you checked with your Internet service provider and asked if there is a hard limit on the number of connections?

4. I don't see any setting in the manual that limits the number of connections. For testing, turn off Bandwidth limiting and see if more connections are allowed.

5. As a last resort, reset the router to its defaults. But(!)...if you do...you will loose all router settings including the admin password (it will be set to its default). However, this may clear whatever is causing the limit.

Good luck.

eT

 

eT: thanks. I'm going a different way now.

My Tenda AC15 AC1900 Router came today. Honestly it took me longer to get my long Ethernet cable out of my closet, unwrap it, then wrap it up and put it away, then it did to set this router up. Went about connecting every device I have (tablets, phones, light controllers) and as the Amazon reviewer said "here, hold my beer..."

All is working now. Sure I have an extra $19 router but no big deal.

Unless I can use the extra one as a WiFi extender to the patio...

 

All the IP address range talk has nothing to do with WiFi guest connection limits. I think someone said that above. Look at your WiFi settings.

Unrelated : DNS is domain name Server. 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4 are google DNS servers. Using your router (192.168.1.1) for dns defaults to using your ISP’s choice for translation service of ip addresses <-> names. Encourage you to use googles values. Fast, reliable.

 

You don't really know that without knowing how it actually works. The device could be dropping connections beyond 10.

eT

 

Using your router as a DNS server doesn’t necessarily mean that you will default to your ISPs DNS servers. What it means is that A device on your network can find devices connected locally. If it can’t find a name there, your router will forward your request to its own DNS servers.

It’s DNS servers can be those supplied by your ISP or to servers you specify. Usually these can be specified in your router’s settings and could be the Google or other DNS server. In a Windows network, you would specify the internal DNS server. A Windows DNS server by default forwards your request to a variety of Internet DNS servers and hence you do not need to specify a DNS forwarding server explicitly.

 

Djsfantasi, makes sense. I learned something about dns.

Eetech00, I guess you’re spot on, although ‘as configured’, it seems to be a problem elsewhere. For sure, hard to diagnose with limited data and no access!

Thanks you two.

 

The DNS server IP specified in the DHCP configuration is used by the clients for DNS lookup's. If the router IP address is used (like shown in #13, then the router will "proxy" the request to the external DNS servers (only if the entry is not found in its DNS cache), and store the response in its DNS cache. Subsequent lookups will be faster since the router has cached the lookup. If an external IP, like 8.8.8.8 is configured, then the client will query external DNS servers directly producing latency.

eT

 

I started to say that DNS has nothing to do with DHCP. And in one respect, that is a correct statement.

DHCP is the protocol for providing an IP address to a client that does not have a static IP address. But, it CAN provide other configuration services.

Except, DHCP provides more than an IP address, WHEN NEEDED.

What this means if a client is configured to use a specific DNS server, but requests a dynamic address - it will not get an address of a DNS server from DHCP. This particular specification of DHCP can result in some confusion. On the other hand, it’s useful in designing a network.

For example, again in a Windows network, Ethernet connections are often configured to ONLY send requests to the internal server. The local DNS server automatically takes care of furwarding requests. In a medium to large environment, this configuration is often the most efficient, as most name requests are for internal resources.