Router vs access point

Question

I'm trying to expand my home Wi-Fi as the wireless router my ISP provided is quite weak and my house is too big for it, so the Wi-Fi won't get to the living room. I already have some holes in the walls of the rooms between my router and my living room so what I plan on doing is running a Cat6 cable through them into my living room. Then, I'll attach an access point in one end and the router in the other. The thing is, you can use another router as an access point, and I stumbled upon these in amazon:

Access point

Wireless router

As you can see, the access point is more expensive and both are supposedly 300mbps N Wi-Fi. I don't understand this, why is it like that? Isn't a wireless router an access point with additional hardware necessary to do routing and forwarding? If it has more hardware, why is it cheaper? Should I just go with the router, provided it does the same function as the AP and is cheaper?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

Yes, from an IEEE 802.11 ("Wi-Fi") protocol perspective, these products are both Access Points. The 802.11 standard doesn't define whether the AP should act as a simple bridge to Ethernet, or a router to an IP network, or a NAT gateway, or anything else.

In modern marketing of these kinds of devices, the marketing people tend to sell it as a "wireless router" if it has home gateway features like being a NAT gateway and a DHCP server, and they tend to sell it as an "AP" if it's just a simple bridge.

However, devices that marketers sell as APs tend to have features important for business and other institutional networks, such as PoE, mass manageability, advanced diagnostics, and more.

Because there's not as much market for these business-oriented boxes, the economics of the market are different, causing these business APs to sell for more than a very mass-market competitive consumer-focused home gateway wireless router box with generally the same top-level specs.

In this particular case, you'd buy this AP if you needed to power it over PoE. Most people don't need PoE, so the people that DO need it end up paying a little more for it because it's a relatively rare requirement.

Answer 2

You can use most typical Small Office / Home Office (SoHo) routers as access points. Just don't use their WAN port, disable their DHCP server, and assign them an IP address inside your LAN but outside the other router's DHCP range. Configure the WiFi however you want, but using the same SSID and encryption is recommended to allow roaming and using different channels is recommended for improved performance.

Answer 3

Unless you want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting, it is simpler to use an access point than to connect two routers (you might run in to issues with double-NAT).

I would say the price difference is a coincidence; you can spend anything from a few dollars to a couple hundred or more on either device. Keep in mind the amount of memory, antenna's and other hardware the device has will affect the speed and maximum number of simultaneous connections.