I am in the UK. I have a BT Home Hub 4 router in my living room, input = ADSL 2+, output = 1 of the 4 LAN outputs (the single Gigabit port) going into my TP-LINK 8 port Gigabit switch (TL-SG108v2). From here I have several of the 8 ports connected to TV equipment (Android TV box, YouView box, A/V amplifier, etc.) in the living room. One of the remaining 8 ports runs from my living room to my dining room on the other side of my house and currently plugs into one of the 4 LAN ports of my Netgear R7000. The other 3 LAN ports are connected to my backup server, printer, main PC.
With this setup all my devices have the same IP group 192.168.1.x
The BT Home Hub is the DHCP server
Both my BT Home Hub 4 and the R7000 have their 2.54GHz and 5GHz wireless turned on but with different SSIDs and different channels (to minimise interfence).
Question 1
I really want to use the WAN port on the R7000 as another LAN port, since I want to attach one more device in my dining room and there are no spare LAN ports. Is this possible? I know that I could connect the existing cable from the TP-Link switch to the R7000 WAN port and so gain the extra LAN port but this then makes another IP group 192.168.2.x and now some of my devices cannot see the others.
Question 2
I also thought that the R7000 would make a better "main" router than the BT Home Hub 4. Is it possible to off-load some of the routing tasks to the R7000? As it stands I cannot use the QOS feature and some other features since I do not use the WAN port. Is this where bridging the BT Home Hub 4 comes into play?
Question 3
Would any of the above be possible if I switched from the official Netgear firmware 1.0.9.10_1.2.21 to one of the 3rd party firmwares?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Darren
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