Wireless internet in your room

Why does the Netz-AK not offer a “ready-to-use WiFi” for the room?

1. With our own WiFi, you can access the Internet with your game consoles, printers and everything else you want.
2. A router will cost you an average of €35 once, “ready-to-use WiFi” would become more expensive after two months at most.
3. Helping each of you (with any kind of device) to connect to a WiFi managed by us is too much work for us volunteers.
4. Gamers and people who use the network intensively appreciate the lower latency and higher speed of a network cable.

In short, it is more free, faster and cheaper.

How do I set up my own WiFi?

You connect a router to our network socket and then it usually works.

Common problems:

• The network socket often has two ways to plug in the cable, but only one is active at a time (try both!).
• Not everything that is sold as a router is a real router, sometimes it is a DSL modem or an access point (see list).
• The software settings in the router. Your connection is not a DSL connection and there are no credentials needed (see settings).

List of routers that work in our network

We are not allowed to recommend a specific router, but we have made a selection from the routers we have helped you with since 2019. Everything marked “🚫” in the table is not a router and does not work on our network. Everything marked “✔️” in the table is a wireless router and works.
Your Router should support 5 GHz (📶), otherwise we expect dropouts 🚩.
If you have a router that is not on the list, please contact us (subject: Creating a WiFi) and we will add it to the list.
If you search for “router 5 GHz” you`ll find several devices for ~35€. If you pay more you won`t get “better internet”, but if you pay less you usually don`t get “5 GHz” (less interferences with other WiFis). Since 2024, we will no longer support FritzBox routers in our network.
All devices with this symbol 🙅‍♀️ we definitely not recommend and all with this symbol 🏎️ can use the full potential of the dorms with gigabit connection.

show list

Router settings

First you have to know that the connection in the room is an Ethernet connection and not like in most households DSL.
You need a WiFi-router which you connect with the WAN-port (the blue cable in the picture) to the network socket in your room. Now you connect a PC with the router. In most cases you have two options. The first option is that you connect your PC to the wifi of your router. If a wireless key required it is in most cases printed on a label
on the bottom of the device.
The second option is that you connect your PC to one of the
Lan-ports (in yellow ones in the picture) of your router. Now you open the web interface of your router in your browser(Internet explorer, safari, chrome, …). The required address and login information should also be printed on a label on the bottom of your device. The address should be similar to 192.168.x.1. In the now open web interface you should use the Setup-Wizard. You chose as connection type “receive IP automatically over DHCP”. Another common name ist “IP-Client-Modus”. Remember the connection is an Ethernet connection and does not need any Login data .
Afterwards you should change the password for your router and your network key. If you want you can also change your network name (SSID.)

Example: TP-LINK TL-WR940N

If you have trouble with one of the steps, we configure your router together.