Transcription
Most people think about the router in their home network. They think of it as the device that allows their other devices to connect to the internet. In reality, however, your router can do so much more than that, so you're actually short changing it when you describe it that way. Don't worry, I won't tell.
In fact, in many of my previous episodes where I talk about, for example, how to set up your router and your home network, one of the common comments that I get is, "Can you use your router without an internet connection?" Well, that's exactly what we're gonna be diving into today. We're gonna be talking about can you use your router without an internet connection, and if so, what are some things you can do with it? So let's dive in.
It's important to make sure we're on the same page about the actual function of your router, because your router's function isn't actually to provide your devices with an internet connection. It's to allow all of your devices to share one internet connection. That internet connection comes from your internet service provider, and that's your modem's job to provide your home with an internet connection. Your modem connects to your internet service provider, which is how your home gets your internet connection, and your router connects to your modem so that all the devices that connect to your router can share that internet connection.
Now, the other part of a router's functionality is to allow your devices to communicate with each other. So if we're stripping away the internet connection and the modem, if we strip this out of the equation, what we still have is your router's ability to allow the devices in your home network to communicate with each other.
So in answering the question of the day, the answer is yes. You can still use your router without an internet connection. It will have half its functionality, but there's still plenty you can do with it.
On that topic, what are some things you can do with your router if it doesn't have an internet connection? Well, first and foremost, and this is a popular one, a lot of people like to share their media using their router. For example, they can share family pictures or movies either through a network attached storage device that's connected to the router, or if the router has a USB port, you can put the files on a thumb drive, connect it to the router and share those files.
Secondly, you can still use smart devices in your home if your router doesn't have a connection to the internet. For example, if you have a smart switch and you're on your home network, you can still toggle that switch on and off using your router that the smart switch is connected to. You don't need an internet connection for that unless you're away from your home and you need to use that smart switch away from your home. In that case, then you'll need a router with an internet connection.
Another thing you can do is if you have a printer in your home and you can connect it to your router with either an Ethernet port or a USB port, what you can do is you can have a network attached printer with that router, and you don't need an internet connection for that either.
Another option here, and it's similar to the smart devices, is if you have security cameras in your home with a security system, you can connect all of those devices together using a router without a connection to the internet. Now, another important caveat here is you won't be able to view those cameras away from your home, but if all you're doing is recording video and you view it later and you always do it in your home, then you don't really need a connection to the internet and you can use your router without one.
This last one is the most nostalgic for me. What I'm talking about here is hosting a local gaming session. If you have multiple gaming systems, you want multiplayer to be able to play against each other. You can connect these devices together with a router without a connection to the internet, and it will allow you to have a local area network gaming session. Oh, the good old days of Xbox. I miss those days. Maybe this is an outdated option, but it's an option if you have an older gaming system or if you still have LAN parties. By the way, I'd love to hear in the comments section. If you're still hosting LAN gaming parties, I'd love to know the system and the game that you play with your friends. That'll bring me back to the good old days. Alright, enough about that. Let's get back to the topic at hand here.
One thing we've been talking about is all the things a router without an internet connection can do. An important distinction here, however, is that you don't need to have one router in your home network. For example, you can have one router that has an internet connection, and one router that doesn't. They can be broadcasting different Wi-Fi networks, and then you just connect to the Wi-Fi network based upon the activity you're carrying out. For example, if you need to access the internet, you connect to one of the Wi-Fi networks of the router that's connected to the internet. If you just need to access, say, shared media or a printer, you can connect to the router that doesn't have an internet connection. And the reality is, anything that you're connecting to that router that doesn't have an internet connection is inherently more secure because it can't be accessed outside of your home. What I'm talking about here, if you have videos or media or a printer, you know that nobody can access that over the internet if you connect it to the router without an internet connection. So if you're able to use these devices, you have a use case where you don't need to access, whether it be this printer or these files, away from home, then this is a great opportunity to take an old router or a spare router, set it up and use it for your media sharing, non-internet connecting router in your home. That was a mouthful, but hopefully you get what I'm saying there.
Setting up a second router is actually something I've done before in my home network, and I want to show you how to do it just so you can see how easy it is. So let's say I have a spare router lying around. All we need to do to set this up as our secondary router is we need to provide it with a power connection. We don't need to use this Ethernet port on the back to connect it to our modem because this router isn't going to be having an internet connection. We literally just take the power cord, we plug it in, and then we'll take it from there.
Okay, so here we go. We have my router. Here's my power cable that's plugged into the wall. We're just gonna connect it to the back of the device. We'll see in a second here, these lights start flashing and it starts to boot up. We'll give it a minute here and then we'll take it from there. At this point, the lights are steady state, this device is booted up. You might notice that the network light is not lit up, and that's because it doesn't have a connection to the internet. Honestly, that's okay because as soon as we connect this device, we power it up, it's now broadcasting its Wi-Fi networks that we can connect to.
To show you what I mean here, let's go down to my available Wi-Fi networks, and here we go. "Network from Home - Second Router - 2.4G Network." That's one of the Wi-Fi networks, and here's the second one, "Network from Home - Second Router - 5G." Let's connect to it. Now we're connected to one of the Wi-Fi networks of my secondary router, as you can see here. Let's try to access the internet and see what happens. As expected, it says, "The site can't be reached." That's because our router doesn't have a connection to the internet. Here we get a notification saying, "No internet." We can confirm that by going down to the Wi-Fi network we're connected to. It says, "No internet, secured." Again, not surprising because our secondary router doesn't have a connection to the internet.
With that said, we can still access the secondary router settings because it's broadcasting a Wi-Fi network. We can connect to it directly. We don't need an internet connection to access our router settings. So if we go in here, type in the IP address of the device, we should be able to see its settings, and here we go. Here's the login page of our secondary router settings. We can access these settings, make any changes to either the Wi-Fi network or security settings, or even file sharing settings that we want to make for the files that we're sharing. We can do that all in the router settings without an internet connection.
What I might recommend is if it's been a while since you've used this secondary router, let's say it's a spare that's been sitting around for a while, you might wanna perform a factory reset of the device and then go in and access the settings and configure them as you want them. I've previously made a video detailing how to access your router settings if you need help with that. I've also made another video talking about how to perform a factory reset of your router. So these might be useful resources that I'll put in the description of this video.
We've spent a lot of time talking about what a router can do without an internet connection, but it's important to reiterate what a router can't do without an internet as well. For example, you can't remotely access any devices in your home network without an internet connection. You won't be able to update the firmware of any smart devices. This is kind of a drawback here. Obviously, this secondary router, you won't be able to update it without an internet connection because what's happening is these devices are reaching out to the internet to pull those updates down. So what you might want to do is occasionally connect those devices to the internet so you can update them and just make sure they're secure. But also keep in mind too, there's less of a need for them to be secure if they're on your home network. They're not accessible by the public internet, and you're the only one accessing these devices. Of course, the obvious add-on here is you can't browse the internet. You can't have an online gaming session. You can't do anything using the internet. You're restricted to your local network and the devices on your home network when your router doesn't have a connection to the internet.
If you've learned something from this video or you were inspired to set up a secondary router in your home network without an internet connection, please give this video a like. And as always, thanks for checking out this episode from Network from Home, and we'll catch you on the next one.