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Forum Discussion
Setting up a repeater (just a WIFI extender for the Nighthawk x6 [AC3200] Model: R8000
I would like to setup my Neatgear Nighthawk x6 [AC3200] Model: R8000 as a WIFI repeater. I do not need to use the LAN ports, the least I want is to just set it near the end of my WIFI range ...
If you have not purchased a product yet, then the best option is to go with an extender with a dedicated backhaul such as the EAX80 or EX7500.
One issue with dd-wrt is its implementation of an extender function has not changed in the past 15 years, and has a massive amount of overhead since It doesn't support most of the hardware acceleration functions of the modern SOCs. The setup process is also quite unintuitive. Ideally it is best to look at videos detailing the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJaYE9Yk7gc
With the stock firmware on Netgear WiFI routers, they only offer 2 additional modes.
- WiFI AP mode, where you connect an Ethernet cable from the WAN port to the LAN port of your main router, and the Netgear router will act as a wired AP.
- Wireless bridge mode, where the router dedicates its WiFi radio to forming a wireless backhaul to the main AP/ WiFi Router. In that mode, no wireless clients can connect to the netgear router that is in wireless bridge mode, thus clients on it will need to connect to the Ethernet ports, or you would need to connect another wired AP to the Ethernet port of the Netgear router that is in wireless bridge mode (wasteful).
Razor512 The EAX80 doesn't support a dedicated wireless backhaul. Its a dual channel extender. It does support wired backhaul in AP mode.
nocinc Razor512 is correct in that the R8000 doesn't support a repeater/extender mode. and 3rd party firmwares can produce abysmal results. If you can hardwire it in somewhere and use it in access point mode, it'd work for you.
but otherwise you'd be better off to look at an actual wireless extender. I'm a fan of the tribands. (EX7500/EX7700/EX8000)
Sorry, forgot that it didn't have the dedicated backhaul. For that one I only had a short time with it, but the performance was better than that of my EX8000 by a good margin, though I didn't feel a need to move from the EX8000 in my own network since I largely use it for a few IOT devices that use batteries, but when they want WiFi connectivity and a 2 year battery life, the transmit power is quite low (lower than many Bluetooth devices) on them (few moisture and temperautre sensors). Beyond that, it is also used for coverage of the back yard so that I can stream podcasts while doing yard work. Beyond that the RAXE500 provides great coverage for everything else.
I set it up at my friend's barn since it could communicate with his RAX200 from a pretty good distance and still provide close to 200Mbps at a distance where smartphones would struggle to hit 10Mbps. While not the use case Netgear probably had in mind, it was a cheaper solution than setting up a few Ubiquiti nanobeams and a secondary AP.
Never had the EAX80 to try to see how it compares with the triband extenders in both latency and speed drop.
