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WAN OR LAN Port for Access Point
Question about using the Nighthawk R8700 as an AP. The documents say connect a ethernet cable from the LAN on the primary router to either the WAN OR LAN on the netgear, but all the photos show it p...
There are up to 2 ways to use a router as an Access Point.
- Enable AP Mode on those routers that offer this setting. The illustrations usually show the WAN port being used. In theory, a LAN port should work, but one user found a bug on the R7500 where traffic would stop flowing if the WAN port was disconnected (link). I don't know if the R7800 has the same bug.
- Use the old school method. Manually disable the DHCP server, set a static IP address in LAN Setup and connect a LAN port. What's the difference? Empirical speed tests performed by a user on another forum showed that AP Mode is significantly worse than this method. It's believed that traffic that transits between the LAN and WAN ports incurs significantly much more packet processing.
AP Mode is easy to enable but the old school method should be superior.
The routerlogin.net trick relies on the router intercepting the DNS query sent by your computer and returning its own IP address instead of sending the query to a real DNS server. I don't know if the router continues to intercept queries while in AP Mode, but it's also possible for the router to never see them. When a router is in AP Mode, it is no longer the default gateway, so there may be devices whose packets never transit the router.
I recently upgraded my access point from an old WNDR3700 to R7000. The main router is also R7000. With the new R7000 as access point I used the WAN port as suggested in the manual.
I have tested the transfer times: copying a 2065 MB file from a desktop wired to the router, wired connection to the access point and then wired connection to a laptop with SSD disk. I tested many times, and here are the average speeds:
WAN port: 395 Mbps
LAN port: 825 Mbps
So the LAN ports are just gigabit switches, while there is something extra going on from the WAN port.
Pluto8 wrote:I recently upgraded my access point from an old WNDR3700 to R7000. The main router is also R7000. With the new R7000 as access point I used the WAN port as suggested in the manual.
I have tested the transfer times: copying a 2065 MB file from a desktop wired to the router, wired connection to the access point and then wired connection to a laptop with SSD disk. I tested many times, and here are the average speeds:
WAN port: 395 Mbps
LAN port: 825 Mbps
So the LAN ports are just gigabit switches, while there is something extra going on from the WAN port.
Read the link I provided above. AP Mode disables hardware acceleration, so the CPU needs to handle packets going between the LAN and WAN ports. The Broadcom chip can handle switching between LAN ports without CPU involvement.
One other thing I've noticed.
if its plugged into the WAN Port, under attached devices, I'm seeing everything, my cable boxes, my PC, any Ethernet connected device. When I had it in the LAN port all I saw was my Wireless devices.
Also I don't know if this is caused by setting it to AP mode, but under Statics: I'm showing 100M/Full, not sure why its not 1000 as I have a cat5e going from the Fios Router to the Netgear.
WAN 100M/Full 2483422 2603729 0 6722 14501 01:03:45:33
