I ditched my fancy gaming router for an old dusty one—and my lag disappeared

Welcome! In this article, we will break everything down in a simple and practical way.

Introduction

If you’re a gamer, you probably hate lag just as much as I do. While I definitely enjoy a single-player game, I play online quite a lot, which means that lag or disconnects both result in terrible gameplay. Not just for me, but also for my teammates (if I have any at the time). My various internet issues made me the laughingstock of my entire team for a time. Thankfully, that stuff is behind me now, and a few different fixes contributed to my more stable gameplay. One of them was just an old router.
My lag problem was never my PC

In this case, it wasn’t even the ISP

When a game starts acting up, the two main culprits in people’s minds (my own included) are the PC and the ISP. If you read my How-To Geek coverage, you probably know that I don’t have the best track record with ISPs, so that’s naturally where my mind gravitates to first when the problem is definitely rooted in the network. It’s pretty easy to tell low fps apart from high latency, after all. When the game itself runs smoothly, and single-player titles behave exactly as they should, and the trouble only shows up online, well, there you have it: it’s probably the network. You might suddenly rubber-band across the map, watch other players freeze in place, or get hit by something you could swear you already dodged. That all sounds like network problems. In my case, this one time, it was not the ISP. My download speeds were fine, and the connection wasn’t dropping for everyone in the house. The problem was more specific than that: my gaming PC was getting a connection that was fast enough on paper, but not stable enough when every tiny delay could be a deal-breaker.

The old router became a better access point, not a second router

The difference matters more than it sounds

Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

As I was scratching my head and trying to figure out this network bottleneck, it occurred to me that I had an old router collecting dust somewhere, and that could be the answer to my problems. (Spoiler alert: it was.) It wasn’t new or fancy at all, not like my main very gaming-esque router, but it was there, and it could actually still do some work. The trick was to stop thinking of that old dusty router as a router. I didn’t need it to replace my main router, which was indisputably better, and I didn’t need it to handle my oversized home network. I just needed it to give my PC a better, closer, more reliable way onto the same network I was already using. That’s where access point mode comes in. Instead of creating a whole separate network and acting like a second router, the old router can work more like an extra Wi-Fi doorway into the existing network. The main router still handles the important stuff, but the old router gives nearby devices a stronger local connection, which is exactly what my gaming PC needed.

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The cable was the real upgrade

And it was super cheap, too

Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

The old router was useful, but the cable is what made the whole thing awesome. A secondary access point still needs a solid path back to the main router, and in my case, that path was a basic Ethernet cable. That wired link meant the old router didn’t have to fight its way back to the main router over the same unstable Wi-Fi I was already getting frustrated with. It had a steady connection to the network, and my gaming PC only had to connect to something much closer. If you can plug the PC directly into that old router, even better, but even using it as a nearby Wi-Fi access point can be a big improvement over reaching across the house for the main router.
How to do this yourself

Without breaking your network, ideally

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

The easiest version of doing this yourself is to check whether your old router has an access point mode. If it does, enable it, connect the old router to your main one with an Ethernet cable, and follow the setup prompts. Before your old router joins the fray, make sure you update its firmware, change the admin password, and use a modern Wi-Fi security option like WPA2 or WPA3. If your router doesn’t have a dedicated access point mode, you may still be able to do it manually. The basic idea is to give your old router a LAN IP address on your existing network, disable its DHCP server so it doesn’t hand out conflicting IP addresses, and connect one of its LAN ports back to the main router over Ethernet.

Router menus vary a lot, so check the manual for your exact model before changing settings, because this is the part where using the old router as a second router by accident can really downgrade your network.
The difference shows up in gameplay, not benchmarks

Don’t bother with speed tests for this

Credit: Nick Lewis / How-To Geek

Speed tests are useful for checking whether your internet connection is working, but they’re not the best way to judge this kind of fix, so I’d suggest just judging it for yourself. You may be getting good download speeds while still having problems in online gaming. I was. The better test is to just get back in the game and see if there are any connection issues plaguing you or not.
I’ll take stability over speed any day of the week

A faster fiber internet connection can be great, but I’ll just take whatever’s stable any day of the week. As a gamer, you don’t need massive amounts of bandwidth once the game is already up and running. It needs consistency. I’d rather have a connection that’s slightly slower on a speed test but stable in a match.

Conclusion

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