Setting up an Edimax router on a custom subnet

Most Edimax routers ship with a default LAN address in the familiar 192.168.x.x range, which works perfectly well out of the box. There are situations, however, where the default segment clashes with another device on the network, where a corporate VPN expects a different home range, or where someone wants to isolate smart-home gear on its own logical slice of the address space. Changing the subnet is also handy when an existing modem-router supplied by an Australian ISP has already claimed that same address block.

This guide walks through the practical steps of reconfiguring an Edimax router to operate on a different subnet, explains what to watch out for when bridging it with an NBN connection box or a Telstra or Optus gateway, and covers the small gotchas that catch people out the first time they stray from the default settings.

Why change the subnet on an Edimax router

The most common reason in Australian homes is that the NBN connection box or the ISP-supplied modem-router has already claimed the 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24 segment. When you plug an Edimax router into the LAN side of that gateway and try to run it in router mode rather than access-point mode, both devices end up trying to hand out addresses from the same pool. Devices flit between the two, the Edimax admin page becomes unreachable, and the Wi-Fi stops behaving predictably.

A second reason is segmentation. Plenty of households in suburban Sydney, Brisbane or the Adelaide Hills now run a mesh system for the main living areas and a separate Edimax unit dedicated to the granny flat, the home office out the back, or a workshop in the back corner of the block. Giving that outbuilding its own subnet, such as 10.10.10.x, keeps its broadcast traffic away from the streaming devices in the house and makes firewall rules much simpler to reason about.

A third reason is compatibility with work-from-home setups. Several enterprise VPNs used by Australian employers expect the home network to live on something other than 192.168.1.x. If the corporate tunnel refuses to come up, the IT team often asks the user to move their router onto 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x. Edimax gear handles this fine, but the path through the menu is not always obvious to a first-time user.

Finally, some advanced users simply prefer cleaner address plans. A small business running an Edimax as a basic gateway might want the router on 10.0.0.1/24 with a documented DHCP range, which is easier to remember and easier to troubleshoot than a randomised 192.168.x.x block chosen by the factory.

Picking a subnet that will not bite you later

Choosing a new address range is more than picking a number that looks tidy. Several ranges are reserved by RFCs and cannot be routed across the public internet, which is fine for a home LAN, but you also need to make sure the range does not collide with anything else the router will talk to. A device on a 10.10.0.x range trying to reach a 10.10.0.x server on the other side of a site-to-site VPN will simply fail, because the local machine has no route to tell it that 10.10.0.x is remote.

For most Australian homes, the practical private ranges are 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and the less-common 192.168.x.x alternatives such as 192.168.50.x or 192.168.99.x. Many IT professionals reach for 10.x by default because the /8 allocation gives generous room for splitting the network into smaller /24 subnets later on, and the prefix is easy to recognise on a packet capture.

Pre-flight checklist for the new address range:

Confirm the WAN-side gateway, whether the NBN box or the modem-router from Telstra, TPG, Aussie Broadband or another provider, is not already using the same range.
Confirm any mesh system, NAS or server on the LAN is not on that range.
Confirm the range is large enough for the number of devices you plan to connect, plus headroom for visitors and IoT gadgets.
Avoid ranges that overlap with public DNS resolvers or remote work subnets you might want to reach over a VPN tunnel.
Write the new address, subnet mask, gateway and DHCP range on a sticky note before you start; once the router reboots, it disappears from the screen and people forget.
Pick something memorable, like 10.13.37.0/24 or 10.69.0.0/16, as long as it is consistent across the whole LAN.

Accessing the Edimax admin interface

The first practical step is logging into the Edimax configuration page. By default, the unit listens on either 192.168.2.1 or 192.168.0.1, depending on the model. Plug a laptop into one of the LAN ports with a standard patch lead, set the laptop to obtain an address automatically, and point a browser at the default gateway once the connection settles.

If the address is unknown, the Edimax label on the bottom of the unit usually lists the default IP, username and password. The combination admin/admin or admin/1234 is common on older models, while newer firmware often forces a password change on first login. Australian customers who bought the unit through a local retailer such as JB Hi-Fi, Officeworks or an eBay seller will usually find a small printed card in the box with these details.

Once logged in, the home screen will show the current WAN status, the LAN IP, and a navigation tree down the left-hand side. On most Edimax firmware revisions, the LAN settings live under a heading like LAN or LAN Settings, while DHCP is grouped under DHCP Server or LAN Settings as well. The exact wording varies between the BR-6428NS, EW-7438 and EW-7288 families, but the structure is broadly the same.

It is worth taking a screenshot of every existing setting before changing anything. Once the LAN IP changes, the browser session will drop, and without a screenshot you may find yourself guessing the original DNS or DHCP values when something downstream refuses to reconnect at 11 pm on a Sunday.

Applying the new LAN, DHCP and DNS settings

Inside the LAN settings page, look for two fields: the IP address and the subnet mask. The IP is the router's own address on the local network, and the mask defines how much of the address space belongs to this segment. A typical home setup uses 255.255.255.0, which corresponds to a /24 prefix with 254 usable host addresses. To move the router onto a different subnet, change the existing address to the new router address and adjust the mask if needed. For a 10.20.30.0/24 segment, the router would sit at 10.20.30.1 with the same 255.255.255.0 mask. Click Apply or Save and wait for the router to reboot. This is the moment where the browser session will almost certainly die, because the address you were typing into is no longer the address of the router.

After the reboot, manually set the laptop to a static address inside the new range, such as 10.20.30.50 with a mask of 255.255.255.0 and a gateway of 10.20.30.1, then reconnect. If the page comes up, the change has stuck. If not, hold the reset button on the back of the Edimax for ten seconds and start over. The reset button is recessed on most models, so a bent paperclip is the tool of choice. With the router on the new subnet, the DHCP pool needs to follow. The DHCP server hands out addresses to phones, laptops, smart TVs and the rest of the household. If the pool still reads 192.168.2.100 to 192.168.2.200 while the router lives on 10.20.30.1, devices will receive addresses from a segment they cannot route to, and the network will appear fine until the first device tries to reach the internet.

Head back into the Edimax interface at the new address and open the DHCP settings. Adjust the start and end of the lease range so they sit inside the new /24, leave a few addresses free at the bottom for static assignments such as printers, NAS units or the home-lab Raspberry Pi, and confirm the default gateway advertised to clients matches the new router address. DNS settings deserve attention too. Many Edimax models let the user either forward DNS queries to the ISP-supplied servers or specify custom resolvers. Australian households on NBN typically inherit the DNS from the gateway, which means the Edimax is handing out the gateway as the DNS and the gateway is then forwarding upstream. After a subnet change, double-check that this chain still resolves, particularly if the Edimax is now double-NATing behind the NBN box.

Common pitfalls worth checking after the change:

The Edimax has cached the old WAN-side DNS values, which can delay name resolution by a few minutes after the swap.
Static entries on laptops and phones, often set during a previous troubleshooting session, point to the old gateway and need to be flipped back to automatic.
The NBN connection box is set to bridge mode and expects the Edimax to handle PPPoE; if so, the WAN type must match, otherwise the new LAN has no upstream.
Wireless clients keep showing as connected but cannot load pages, which usually means the DHCP lease is still inside the old range and only a reboot of the client will fix it.
The router's own time zone is still set to UTC, which makes the log timestamps confusing when you are trying to correlate an outage with a 5 pm arvo Netflix freeze.

Verifying the new subnet and avoiding future headaches

Once the router is back online on the new subnet, run a quick sanity check. From a wired device, open a command prompt and ping the router at its new address, then ping an external name such as www.google.com. If the name resolution succeeds, DNS is healthy. If the IP ping works but the name does not, the issue is DNS. If neither works, the upstream path is broken, and the WAN configuration is the first place to look.

For Australian households that have moved the Edimax to a 10.x range to keep it away from a Telstra Smart Modem or an Optus Nokia gateway on 192.168.0.x, this is also a good moment to set up a small address map. A plain text file or a printed page stuck inside the cupboard with the router saves a lot of head-scratching when a device misbehaves six months later and the original installer has moved on. The Mornington Peninsula retiree who set the network up with his nephew's help is unlikely to remember that 10.20.30.1 is the Edimax and 192.168.0.1 is the Optus box, but a label on the cupboard door will.

Finally, keep the router firmware current. Edimax pushes security updates on a rolling basis, and several older BR-series models have known DHCP vulnerabilities that are only patched in newer releases. Updating firmware after a subnet change is straightforward: download the file from the Edimax support site on a wired connection, upload it through the admin interface under Administration or Tools, and let the unit reboot. Once the new subnet survives the reboot and the smart TV still finds Stan, Kayo and ABC iView without complaint, the job is done.

The whole process takes longer to read about than to actually carry out. Once you have worked through the steps on one Edimax unit, the next one feels almost routine, and you will find yourself reaching for a non-standard subnet by default rather than treating it as an exotic change. Label everything, keep a screenshot of the working settings, and give the router a reboot test before the next big video call.