My situation is a need for wifi access in a garden office. The garden office is too far from the house to use wifi extenders. There is an ethernet cable from the lounge in the house to the garden office. I can put a wifi access point in the garden office to provide the wifi signal. My problem is that the ethernet socket in the house/lounge cannot be hardwired to the house router. Is it possible to have another wifi access point connected to the ethernet socket in the house/lounge that will 'talk' wirelessly to the house router? I.e main router - wifi to access point - ethernet cable to garden office - wifi access point - wireless laptop.
1
-
1What you're asking for is called a WiFi bridge. Your equipment requires something called 'WDS'.– SilbeeCommented Mar 28 at 9:35
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
Yes, but the 'house' access point needs to have a "station" or "client" mode (might even be called "bridge" mode), and in that mode it will no longer act as an access point (it'll only be a client).
Dedicated access points like UniFi often don't have it; they're meant to be APs only. On the other hand, I think you can usually find this mode in "wireless extenders" when they have an Ethernet port. (Not too familiar with those products.) Even some wireless routers have this mode.
Most such products can connect to any generic Wi-Fi network without special configuration; they perform MAC address translation to avoid the need for WDS (4addr) capability – i.e. your router will see your laptop as having the extender's MAC address. It's not a universal workaround but it will do the job for Internet access and most (though not all) internal LAN usage.
As a side note, even if the garden office is too far for a omni-directional extender to pick up the signal, you can easily find a pair of directional "wireless bridges" that have a range of 10+ km (for about the cost of a router). You don't need them here as you already have Ethernet going to the garden office, but they can be a quick and reliable method of bringing a network to a distant building in general – or even across a hallway.
answered Mar 28 at 9:36
-
Plenty of Ubiqiti so called Access Points have WDS for bridging functionality. Even their ancient nanostation M2 had it.– SilbeeCommented Mar 28 at 9:44
-
@Silbee: Their airMAX products do (that was the whole purpose of nanostation, wasn't it?), but UniFi is a different series with different firmware; I know it has some kind of wireless uplink as a feature, but my impression was that it requires WDS capability and can only connect to another UniFi device and not to any random router. Commented Mar 28 at 9:48
-
You're correcet, the wireless uplink functionality on Unifiy devices is indeed some kind of special ubiquiti sauce that's specific to that vendor. But then i've been treating WDS the same way and tend to stay with same vendor/series devices for bridging.– SilbeeCommented Mar 28 at 9:58
-
If you're not super speed conscious - there's 802.11 ah bridges , they do ~10mbps, but they're fairly cheap, work point to point and seem to work reasonably well in somewhat difficult circumstances– Journeyman Geek ♦Commented Mar 28 at 10:12
-
Thank you - never used bridge mode before. On the Office access point I basically switch off DHCP assign a static ip outside the range of the home main router and set up wifi SSID and password. I'm not sure how to config the bridge mode router - especially the ip address. I guess, obviously (to me) DHCP has to be off– quarkradCommented Mar 28 at 10:40