Are these old wireless routers useful?

[pullman]

I have an ADSL connection the modem of which I have wired to my AEBS which, in turn, creates the wireless network. I also have two old ADSL routers, one very old D-Link DSL-604+ and one Thomson TG712.

I'm wondering if I could put those old routers to any good use, for instance to extend the AEBS's wireless network or perhaps create another non-internet-connected network?

I've probably got too much time on my idle hands here but would welcome any thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks in advance
Philip

 

[belvdr]

I definitely would not use them for any wireless. The D-Link does not support anything better than 802.11b / WEP and is insecure and the Thomson only supports 802.11g.

Personally I would trash them, but if you wanted another internal router, I would test the routing performance before putting them anywhere. You can do this by using two machines and iperf. I would venture to guess they won't support more than 100Mb throughput, which correlates to throwing them away.

 

[pullman]

Thank you for the reply. Yes for wireless they would probably not be very useful (and unsafe). I'll think about it. I'm not sure I need another internal router actually.

br
Philip

I definitely would not use them for any wireless. The D-Link does not support anything better than 802.11b / WEP and is insecure and the Thomson only supports 802.11g.

Personally I would trash them, but if you wanted another internal router, I would test the routing performance before putting them anywhere. You can do this by using two machines and iperf. I would venture to guess they won't support more than 100Mb throughput, which correlates to throwing them away.

 

[TheTruth101]

eBay, or Facebook marketplace better.

 

[belvdr]

eBay, or Facebook marketplace better.

If you're referring to selling them, I doubt you would get much out of them, if anything, after shipping and time spent.

 

[fde101]

I definitely would not use them for any wireless. The D-Link does not support anything better than 802.11b / WEP and is insecure and the Thomson only supports 802.11g.

Thing is, there are some unique old devices, such as the Playstation Portable, still floating around which will not work with the newer wireless standards either, and do not support wired networking. The only way to get those online (enabling access to the store to download games, to remote connections to a PS3, etc.) is to use an older router like that.

 

[belvdr]

Thing is, there are some unique old devices, such as the Playstation Portable, still floating around which will not work with the newer wireless standards either, and do not support wired networking. The only way to get those online (enabling access to the store to download games, to remote connections to a PS3, etc.) is to use an older router like that.

True but every new router I researched for my home supports back to 802.11b and clear text.

 

[dwig]

True but every new router I researched for my home supports back to 802.11b and clear text.

True, but allowing the old (e.g. 802.11b) connections slows down traffic for all other users on that same WiFi connection. Having a unique WiFi connection for the old-and-slow and reserving a separate WiFi connection for the fast-and-furious in the house is a good approach. That said, it's easy enough to by a modern dual frequency (2.4ghz & 5ghz) WiFi AC router and configure things so the old-and-slow use the 2.4ghz channel and the fast-and-furious use the 5ghz AC connection.

The OP's "antique" routers could be used as simple switches with no WAN connection and no WiFi, though they would not likely support 1000baseT and would again be limited to handling the slower traffic.