Nighthawk M1 Hotspot & Nighthawk X6 R8000

Second part of my reply...

While this explanation may sound complicated if you haven't tried doing it before, you can't damage anything - just remember what you change and you can always put the settings back as they were or even do a factory reset. In some routers it's possible to save the configuration to a file which can then be reloaded at a later stage. And if you get stuck, there are plenty of helpful people on this and other similar forums. Here's a Netgear guide on setting up a modem/router as an access point - I haven't tried this out because I don't have a Netgear router with this interface but one thing I notice is that in point 6, it would be better to set manually a fixed IP address for the AP so that you always know how to access it via other devices on the LAN.

A couple of other points - you will probably want to run the M1 without its battery, using only a mains charger. To do this reliably, you may need to buy a more powerful charger if your M1 is supplied with only a 2A charger. See this post for more info. And this post shows you what I purchased - there are no doubt many other, well-designed chargers available so please do your own research on this.

The other point is that the Ethernet port on the M1 was initially programmed to go to sleep after a period of inactivity, which was logical for a hotspot in order to conserve battery charge, but when using it in the unforeseen application of a 24/7 household router, this sleeping was problematic - the power button had to be tapped once to wake it, which is a problem especially when it's in a remote location. However, recent firmware releases in different countries now appear to have changed this behaviour as described in this link. Mine works in this way since an update in early Jan this year.

So my advice - don't be deterred by technology - dive in and explore :smileywink:

Here's part 1a of my reply - I'm going to have to split it into separate paragraphs to see if I can find why/where this forum interface is rejecting the content...

There would certainly be benefits in terms of extending your WiFi coverage. The M1 is a great hotspot in my opinion but any hotspot will understandably have less WiFi range than a modem/router designed for 24/7 household use. There are 2 ways you can do this - you can turn the X6 R8000 into a simple access point, leaving all of the DHCP IP address allocation and other router functions to the M1, or you can turn off those functions in the M1, using it as just the modem, and leave the X6 R8000 to handle the DHCP and other router functions. The M1 would be connected to the X6 R8000 via an Ethernet cable. Either method should work fine - there may be advantages with one over the other, for example, the router functions in the X6 R8000 may be more comprehensive than the M1. Perhaps someone else would like to chip in here with advice.

Here's part 1b...

I have an M1 (in the UK) and have set it up in the first of the above scenarios. I could have connected it directly to a modem/router that I had set up as an access point (or a cheaper, dedicated access point) but my house has thick walls and I wanted to make 5GHz WiFi accessible throughout the house, so I connected the M1 to a low-cost, unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet switch via Ethernet and then wired 2 access points into the switch via a LAN port, not the WAN port. In some routers, when they are set up as an access point, the WAN port becomes another LAN port. If you decide to set the M1 as a modem only, you would connect it to the router's WAN port.

And here's the final part 2c, which I had to remove IP addresses from to get it to post...

I don’t know the X6 R8000, so hopefully someone else will advise you on this. My access points are both full modem/routers in which I have disabled DHCP, firewall, etc. I also needed to change their gateway IP addresses because they were set to the same address as the M1. I put them in the same subnet as the M1 but outside the DHCP range of the M1. You can change the DHCP range in the M1 if you need to. When you change the IP address of your router you will initially lose access to its interface - you need to use the new address to gain access again.

Now go to part 2 above...sorry for the disjointed nature of this reply - I haven't encountered this problem before in this forum :robotfrustrated: