Question Use an AP to connect wired devices ?

[kotsios1983]

Hi all,

I have a problem in a room where i cannot pass an ethernet cable nor coaxial. My question is. If i connect an AP to my router which is located in other room, then use another AP to the specific room i want and connect it wirelessly to the first AP , then use the ethernet port of the AP to connect to an unmanaged switch which i will use to connect wired devices like PC for example, will it work?

Buying a wireless module for the pc is not an option as i will have multiple devices connected with wire.
Also i do not want to use powerline as the bandwidth i will be getting is much slower that WIFI there.

Thank you all in advance

 

[bill001g]

A AP does not work that way. Its only function is to take a ethernet connection and allow multiple wifi device to connect to the AP.

This is reverse of what you want to do.

There are a huge number of devices that will actually do what you want. They commonly are called "extenders" or "repeaters". Many also use the marketing word "mesh" but in general the technology is all the same.

So the short answer is go buy a repeater. It should then directly talk to your main router via wifi and provide ethernet connections.

The longer answer is this is not that simple.

The wifi encryption is designed to prevent you from doing this. The encryption keys use the mac address of the device. Since you are attempting to send the mac of multiple devices over a single wifi connection this can not work. All solutions to this are not part of the standard, they are actually considered a security exposure because they bypass the protection providing by using the mac address in the key.

The most common way to this is to use a protocol called WDS. Your router needs to support this even though it is non standard, most do. Some routers you must enable this feature and/or configure the mac address of the repeater. This is to partially fix the security exposure.

In the long run I am not sure what the solution to a problem like this will be. The new WPA3 encryption standards make it impossible for WDS to function and I have not see anything in the wifi standards that makes repeaters work. I suspect it will all be proprietary hacks used by the companies selling there so called "mesh" systems.