A true AC1900 WiFi Media Bridge.

[KGB7]

Today i have made a little discovery. Perhaps someone has done this in the past with other routers before AC era, with Dual Band N routers, but i dont know.

So you welcome to test this out and get back with your findings. You will need two AC routers and 4 computers with Gigabit NIC's. I cant test this theory, because only one of my computers has a Gigabit NIC, the rest of the laptops have 100Mbps NICs.


First; you will need DD-WRT firmware, i use latest Kong firmware for AC68U routers.
Two; 2-4 computers with Gigabit LAN NICs.


The set up is very simple.

First router should be set up as AP, both Bands should be ON; 2.4Ghz at 40Mhz and 5Ghz at 80Mhz. Use separate SSID for both bands.

Set up second router as Repeater Bridge on both bands; 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. But, do not configure Virtual Interfaces as you would see on DD-WRT Wiki page.

Now both routers will be connected to each other at 1900Mbps.

To test this, connect x2 PCs via Ethernet cable to 1st router/AP and x2 PCs via Ethernet cable to 2nd router/Bridge. You can mix a NAS and few laptops (Ethernet cable connection only) in to equation if you dont have 4 computers with Gig Ethernet NICs.



Let me know what you think.

 

[thiggins]

I just tried to duplicate this using two R7000's and two RT-AC68U's with factory firmware. Neither will let both bands be configured as bridges simultaneously. The Linksys EA6900 doesn't support WDS or client bridge, so can't try that.

It is interesting that this configuration isn't creating a loop, killing your network with a broadcast storm (all the link lights flashing wildly and nothing connecting). Perhaps some VLAN feature is automatically configured preventing that.

At any rate, this doesn't create one 1900 Mbps "pipe", just as link aggregation, which this is NOT, doesn't either. Any given session will connect over one of the two links, not both.

You might see a gain in total throughput available if you have multiple clients running over the link simultaneously. On the other hand, requests might just queue up on one link, because there is no link aggregation code directing the requests over the two links.

 

[KGB7]

Factory firmware has preset settings, thus limits you to what you can do as many of us have seen over the years.


If you have the time, give it a shot and see what kind of throughput you get.