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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.
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.
Thanks all for the info.
TheEther Can you post the link to the other forum where the user experiensed worse performance in AP mode?
I am interested and I will do some tests. At the moment I am in AP mode, in the past I was used to do the "old school".
Thanks.
Wolf_666 wrote:TheEther Can you post the link to the other forum where the user experiensed worse performance in AP mode?
I am interested and I will do some tests. At the moment I am in AP mode, in the past I was used to do the "old school".
Thanks.
Had to search for it. Found it (link). If you want to cut to the chase, the assertion is raised in post #6 and the measurements are provided in post #10. Posts #2 and #18 are also informative about hardware acceleration, which is at the root of the matter.
Note, you are likely to see a difference only at speeds about 450 Mbps.
