As we have seen on other occasions in RedesZone, renewing your WiFi router every 3 or 4 years is a success to enjoy the latest wireless technologies, and also to guarantee firmware updates, both with security improvements fixing different bugs, as well as improvements in the actual operation of the equipment. Many manufacturers when they launch a router, abandon the development of their firmware after about 3 or 4 years, for this reason it is almost necessary to renew our wireless router. The main problem when changing routers is that we have to reconfigure all the WiFi clients in our home, which is a real waste of time.
What to do to make WiFi devices connect to the new router?
Currently all the latest generation wireless routers support various WiFi frequency bands, generally they support 2.4GHz and also 5GHz. However, if you decide to buy a top-of-the-range router with the Wi-Fi 6E standard, you will enjoy the 6GHz band that is completely free of interference from neighboring networks. Next, we are going to indicate what you should do so that changing your old router for the new droidjack one does not pose any problem.
Disable band steering or Smart Connect
Wi-Fi 6 routers usually come configured with Smart Connect or band-steering enabled . This feature allows us to have the same SSID and password for two or three frequency bands , making wireless devices only “see” a WiFi network. When connecting, the router will be in charge of telling the WiFi client to connect to the 2.4GHz, 5GHz or 6GHz band, however, this usually causes a lot of problems because it is a dynamic process: depending on where you connect, the coverage received , number of clients and other parameters that can be configured at the firmware level, could place us in the wrong frequency band.
In addition, IoT devices such as IP cameras, Smart TVs, WiFi thermostats, smart bulbs and other devices only support the 2.4GHz band, and when configuring them with our smartphone, they may have problems connecting to the wireless network because we are also broadcasting the 5GHz band with the same SSID, and our smartphone is surely connected to this frequency band. With its Smart WiFi 6 router, Movistar has incorporated a rather interesting functionality to have band-steering and avoid this, which is basically deactivating the 5GHz band for 10 minutes while you configure the IoT device.
Our recommendation is that you completely disable this functionality, so as not to have problems with the different wireless devices that you connect at home.
Put the same network name, authentication and key
If in the new router we put the same WiFi network name (SSID), authentication and also the WPA access password, we will not have to go WiFi client by WiFi client reconfiguring the wireless network, because these devices will automatically connect to the new router when they have the same configuration as the old router.
It is very important that the SSID for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands are exactly the same, also, if the old router only supported WPA2, then you should define this type of encryption specifically, and not choose options like WPA2/WPA3-Personal, because it could cause problems for the most modern WiFi clients, since the internal configuration does not correspond to the current configuration of the router.
If WPA3-Personal is available on the new router, you should know that it is the latest and most secure WiFi security standard, however, the vast majority of old WiFi clients do not support this standard, which means that you will not be able to use it until you all the WiFi clients you have at home support it.
This is something very important that you should know, therefore, if you plan to activate WPA3 you will have to see what devices can connect. Generally the latest laptops, smartphones and tablets support this type of encryption, especially if we have recently updated the operating system, but you must make sure before using it. To test it without affecting the main WiFi network, you can activate the guest WiFi network with this type of WPA3 encryption. Devices that can connect to this network will be supported, and those that cannot locate the WiFi network will not support it.
As you can see, it is very easy to change the router to a new one and make all the clients connect automatically, we will only have to change the current configuration of the new router and put the configuration of the old router.