Could someone explain IP Passthru on ANY Netgear mobile router? (Someone *using* it)

[growlf]

I have several Netgear mobile hotspots - LTE and 5G models.  I know exactly where to activate IP passthru… blah blah blah.

I’ve been using double-natted connections with these for years to provide internet access to my elderly mom .  She also has Starlink, but lives in the woods with nice tall trees.  Two  Nighthawk mobile 5G routers provide service to even things out (connected to a load balancing router).

I’d love to get away from double-nat, so I ASSUMED I could just turn on IP Passthru on the mobile router and my main load balancing router would pick up an IP over ethernet from the  mobile router.  It did not.  I ended up having to do a factory reset on the device since it had deactivated WiFi and I had no real clue how to deactive IP passthru.  

Anyway… HOW IS THIS SUPPOSED TO WORK?!

I see discussions about people setting DHCP ranges… why?!  If this is IP Passthru, the “routing” and “dhcp server” portion of the device are basically unused (and if that’s somehow working for them, I’d posit they definitely don’t have IP passthru working.)

I see things saying it only works over USB-C?  Perhaps that’s the case, but I don’t get that sense from any of the other discussions.  

I’d just like someone to tell me, like I’m 5, how this should be working on an M6 Pro.  I know how to use the web UI to turn the feature ON, so that’s not needed 🙂

Thanks very much for your time,

John

[meloserj]

Hi

IP Passthrough doesn't need to have DHCP enabled. Whoever mentioned that in forum was wrong.

Just set your GW IP out of the Home router's IP range. e.g home router is on 192.168.1.1 so M5 must be 192.168.10.1

Remember you can't use IP passthrough without any other router as in passthrough mode the IP will first deliver to GW which is 10.1 here and then will be available on 1.1 which is home router. Also you can't directly connect your laptop to M5 via USB/Ethernet/Wifi as you must disable DHCP on M5, turn off Wifi and set ethernet sleep disable.

If your M5 will be on 5G tower, you will face throttling of speed on USB/Ethernet to max 200 Mbps as I tested and found the bug. Reported to support but never received any answer.

Hope this helps.