How to Set Up a Wireless Internet Router

Video Transcript

" I’m Mike with expertvillage.com, today what I’m going to do is show you how to take your regular internet connection with a cable modem or a DSL modem, and add in a router so that you can use more than one computer at home. The example I’m going to be doing also happens to be wireless. Functionally, the two devises are identical other than one having bunny ears being able to broadcast to other computers without a cable. So first thing we’ll do is we’ll just take our cable modem here and disconnect it. We don’t need any power it while we’re doing this. We’re also going to bring in our nice little wireless router here. We’re going to take this. What’s going to happen is that the cable modem is currently connected to the computer via a network cable. We’re going to unplug that and set it aside here for just a moment. We’ll get back the computer number one in just a minute. I want to take a look at the back of the router. On the back of the router, you’ll notice that there are four ports together and then one port off the side. Usually this will say LAN or internet connection, and these will just be numbered as one through four and a lot of times it will be labeled as LAN or local area network, which is what you’re home network is technically called. So what we’ll do is we’re going to have to have another piece of cable. We got that right here, our nice yellow cable. We’re going to connect the yellow cable into our cable modem where our computer was plugged in, take that and connect it to the LAN or internet port on our router. Make our antenna stand up a little better there. What’s going to happen to the cable that went to the computer is now we’re just going to plug that into any of the four ports that we have on the wireless router. Now we’ve got that pretty simple and setup. We can go ahead and reconnect power to all of devises, such as our cable modem. Go ahead. Once our cable modem has power down here and that’s all working, we’ll go ahead and connect power to our wireless router. It’s going to go through a very quick startup sequence and you’ll have a series of blinking lights; nice little light show there, and then you’ll see some traffic indicators. Intermittent blinkings that indicate yes, I’m transmitting or receiving data. Every particular model is different depending on what name brand you might happen to have, so check your owner’s manual to see that there aren’t any problems with the actual hardware, if there’s an error usually there’s an error light or a light will stay on the solid where it shouldn’t or vise versa. Now you have connected your computer to a hub and wireless router. You’re ready to connect more computers in a identical fashion. You can use any of the four ports back here that are still available or connect wirelessly which I’ll cover again in another video."