What You’ll Need

For this tutorial the requirements are quite minimal. You’ll need the following things:

1. Two Wi-Fi routers with Tomato aftermarket firmware installed.
2. An Ethernet cable (optional).

That’s it! You technically don’t even need the Ethernet cable but we always prefer to do any heavy router tweaking over a wired line (saves you the hassle of having to plug yourself in anyway should something go wrong with the wireless configuration and you lose you Wi-Fi connection to the router).

We won’t be covering the installation of Tomato in this guide (for that you can check out our previous installation guide to get up to speed).

A final note before we proceed. The prior DD-WRT guide we shared with you focuses on using the second DD-WRT powered router as a Wi-Fi repeater. Currently, Tomato (and it’s derivative TomatoUSB) do not include the specific software components necessary for a true Wi-Fi repeating mode. The network extension tool included in Tomato is known as Wireless Distribution System (WDS). If you’re interested in the technical aspects of WDS you can check out this Wikipedia entry here. For our purposes there are only a few key details we need to highlight.

The most important difference between setting up a pure repeater (as per our DD-WRT guide) and setting up a WDS node, is that the WDS suffers a performance hit after the first transmission hop. What this means in practical terms is that if you were, say, transferring a file between a laptop in your bedroom which was connected to your WDS node upstairs (which is then, in turn, connected to your actual router in your office), and then to a network drive connected to that office router, you’d suffer a theoretical performance hit of 1/2 the Wi-Fi transmission speed.

This sounds like an awful compromise, but in reality you likely won’t even notice it. Unless you’re trying to transfer massive files over your network by Wi-Fi (which isn’t very practical to begin with) the potential halving of transmission speed is of no practical impact for simple web browsing and small file transfers–and is far outweighed by the huge signal boost you get from the placement of the secondary node.

Although we’re focused on extending a Wi-Fi network with this guide, it is worth noting that you can use the secondary router (once configured in WDS mode) to plug in wired devices via Ethernet. Thus you could, for example, place the secondary Wi-Fi router near a network-enabled printer or older computer without a Wi-Fi connection and use the secondary router as a sort of Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge.

All that said, if  you find the Wi-Fi performance hit to be unacceptable you can always flash your secondary node with DD-WRT and configure it as a pure repeater.