Can I use a DIR610 router as a cabled repeater?

Question

I have a spare router of the model above, and there's a corner of my house that receives bad coverage from my dual band router, so I thought about using the former as a WiFi repeater for the N band.

So I went into it's configurations, set it as a repeater, but I was surprised to see it will just fricking ignore there's a gigabit connection coming in via cable and will connect via WiFi, then repeat the signal, and it seems it has no option to use the cablr instead. When connected to it I get, in the best situation, a ludicrous 20 megabit bandwidth, about half the speed I get from the dying signal of the other router.

Worst of all, while seeing it as a repeater, it asks for my SSID and password. I thought it'd change itself to the same SSID and password, but no, it only repeats the damn signal (as I said, it degrades the connection, even with low signal I get at least 30-50mbit from the other router, problem is when I walk outside that side of the house, I start to get DC's) and I am not able to access it's console anymore, so if I want to change any of it's configs I have to teset it and then set all the settings BEFORE I bridge it.

Is it all supposed to be like this? I mean, I know it's a cheap and old router, but I didn't know routers were that dumb.

Thanks.

Answer 1

That's the expected behavior for a repeater – just as the name says, it receives and repeats an existing Wi-Fi signal.

On the other hand, the "cabled" variant that you want is not usually called a "repeater", as it doesn't repeat anything but produces its own network – the usual term is "access point" or an AP (or sometimes a wireless bridge, I guess).

Unlike repeater mode, AP mode isn't a special feature; it's already the most basic mode of providing a Wi-Fi network. All "wireless routers" act as access points, in addition to some unnecessary stuff like routing – so what you need to do is bypass the routing part.

To achieve this, connect the uplink cable (from the main router) to one of the "LAN" ports, which are almost always bridged to the Wi-Fi network, and avoid using the (routed) "WAN" port. This will result in the same IP subnet being extended all the way through – instead of creating a separate subnet, which is what used to cause your disconnections.

Many other articles refer to this as a "LAN-to-LAN" configuration.

(Since the device is no longer used as a router, you'll also need to turn off its DHCP server or it'll conflict with the real router's.)

Answer 2

You said "cabled repeater". So if you hook up this device to your network by Ethernet (cable), wireless from it will be as good as your main network. You can set up the same SSID to see if that works but it does not always work well.

If wireless from this router does not work well, that means the router itself may not be much good.