Reviving a D-link DSL-2750B as access point in 2024

Year 2024.

5G mobile networks able to reach incredible fast speed and low latency.

Gigabit fixed networks are now more common than ADSL was a few years ago.

Me reviving an old ADSL2+ Wireless N modem router as backup solution for a Wi-Fi range extended that decided (or is about to) to die.

I’m tired, boss#

5 or 6 years ago, I decided to get a Netgear EX3700 Wi-Fi Range Extender to finally bring the Wi-Fi connectivity also in my bedroom. I though that this small white box was kinda perfect to suit my needs:

  • Having Wi-Fi connectivity in my bedroom, and..
  • Having Wi-Fi connectivity in my bedroom.

It was quite demanding, don’t you think?

Jokes apart, this product was:

  • Discreet enough not to disturb anyone in the house.
  • Quite small and easy to hide.
  • Up to 750Mbps with support for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
  • Access Point configuration using the Gigabit Ethernet port.

And this thing worked like a charm until the last two months, when it became very unstable. It would reset itself every now and then, or disconnect every ~2 hours. A hard reset was all it took to fix the random resets, it was still unstable and would disconnect from time to time.

Save it from the trash bin#

Many years ago I had a D-Link DSL-2750B as my internet gateway and it worked pretty well until I upgraded my internet service to Gigabit Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH). Getting a gigabit network meant changing the internet gateway to something newer and capable of handling the speed and technology, and that was when I left the good old D-Link in a paper box.

Now it’s back, but this time it’s being used as an access point to bring Wi-Fi connectivity to my bedroom. It’s still not up to gigabit network speeds, but that doesn’t matter this time. It doesn’t matter because the devices I use over Wi-Fi are fine with ~50-60 Mbps (or even less).

I was expecting it to be quite challenging to configure, but instead it was quite easy, also thanks to @mrgionsi ’s tips.

(tl;dr;)

  • As first step, I just performed a “factory reset”, to make sure that no old configuration was still loaded in. I did it by pressing the reset button available behind the D-Link.
  • Then I connected to the D-Link using an Ethernet cable, and mainly configured two things:
    • LAN setup
    • Wireless setup
  • Last but not least: plug an Ethernet cable from the main gateway into a D-Link LAN port (not WAN!)

The first step needs no explanation, just press the D-Link reset button.

The LAN setup requires two steps to perform: first, I chose an IP (e.g., 192.168.1.2) as the D-Link address from the main gateway’s internal subnet (e.g., 192.168.1.0/24), and later I will make sure that this IP won’t be assigned by the gateway to any other device. Then I changed the DHCP settings to use the main gateway as the DHCP server, so I set the DHCP Relay option to the main gateway IP address (e.g., 192.168.1.1).

The Wireless setup is no magic, just changing both the SSID and network password to something fancy and more complex.

Once I had updated and applied the configuration to the D-Link, I removed the Ethernet cable connecting the PC directly to the D-Link and used it to connect from the gateway to a D-Link LAN port.

Conclusion#

In my opinion, this is one of the best solutions that can be achieved by reusing spare hardware when there are no special needs and it all costs $0. We often buy a lot of new stuff and forget about the old stuff that’s still working fine.

In my case, using the D-Link as an access point seems like a good choice, allowing me to connect to the home network even from my bedroom. Devices connected via the D-Link can get ~60Mbps, which is more than enough to do a lot of things, even watch Netflix in high quality.

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