I thought this would be easy. Ugh.

I apologize if this seems like a repeat of a thread I started sometime last year. I'm continuously trying to improve the connection to my home theater, which is currently connected with powerline ethernet adapters. Here's what I'm currently trying to do:

I have a fairly new Airport Extreme (with the gigabit ethernet) that's acting as my main router and feeding the internet to all the computers upstairs and any wireless devices in my home.

I now want to add another Airport Extreme (one that came out just before the gig-E, but that doesn't matter for this application), and use it as a bridge to supply wired access to devices in my home theater. I do not want it to redistribute the wireless.

Does anyone know how the settings in the Airport Utility should be set for both devices? It's driving me insane! I've tried every mix of settings on the two routers, from slight changes to full MAC address assigning, and I can't figure it out! And so far the interwebs have been no help. I've been searching the Apple forums, and not found any help (no offense to anyone who might be over there, but from what I've read there, people aren't very helpful).

Is WDS actually what I want? It seems as though I should be able to do this without it, as I don't actually want to extend my wireless network.

According to this it looks like you want WDS.

Edit: And this.

The instructions there describe pretty much what I was doing, but it doesn't work. Actually, I had to do things a little more manually than that. I don't know if it's because I'm using Windows, but I wasn't given the option of letting the main WDS station search for the remote. I had to enter the MAC manually, and now both routers claim that WDS isn't working because they can't find another WDS device, even though I've specified the MAC addresses. I'm pretty sure I chose the correct MAC, too, the one that says "Airport" and not "Ethernet" on the bottom of the units.

I think those instructions are a little old, and of course for the Mac. I don't know how or if they'd differ for the PC, but I know that the options in general look very different.


*edit*
Oops. Once again, I feel like an idiot. Looks like the password on one of the two airports was just slightly different. It's working now. I would have liked that automatic scan, though

Now I'll just have to see if the throughput is enough for me to live with the diminished wireless speed from the WDS...

**edit 2**
Yup, it is. I might lose a little speed overall, but with the powerline adapters I was getting about 1.25MBps, and with the WDS setup, I'm getting about 2.1MBps. I'm happy with that.

WDS and bridging are fairly different beasts.

WDS essentially extends a single access point using a second access point at the cost of halving the bandwidth since each access point has to "relay" i.e. receive and then re-transmit the data as you've noticed.

Bridging (which is not what you're calling bridging) makes one of the access points a client to the access point, just like a laptop is a client. It then provides an ethernet output and any wired ethernet can connect to a wireless network. You do not halve the bandwith doing this. DD-WRT running on the WRT54G routers also does some tricks with MAC addresses to make it look like it's all the IP address that live behind it. If your wireless makes it the distance in one hop, this would be the preferred solution in my opinion.

The WDS would however extend your network for all other devices, perhaps out on to the back deck or something.

I'm surprised you are getting 2.1MBps with WDS over a 802.11g network unless you've turned the security off. That's about the most you'd normally see using a single point to point with a reasonable level of security in my experience.

That's Mbits/sec (very likely), not Mbytes/sec (less likely to be that good).

Actually, that was exactly what I was calling bridging, but I couldn't see a way to do it with the Airport Extreme, and there wasn't any information on it that I could find online. If you have any info on how to do this with the hardware I have, I'm all ears. As I mentioned earlier, I do not want to extend my wireless network, just use the second router as a bridge, but because I could not see a second option, and none were available to me, I went the WDS route.


Ah, that would be because the Airport Extreme is an 802.11n router.


Nope, Mbytes. That's why I used the big B.

But honestly, that's just a very informal test. I used a file copying program that tells me the bandwidth as it copies the file, and I just gave a rough average of what it was reporting.

OK. Cool. If it's a 802.11n router, then that sounds about reasonable for real life figures - somewhere around double what you'd get for 802.11g.

OK I see you wanted bridging initially. I assumed the WDS you ended up with was what you were trying for. It's unlikely the Airport would support bridging I would think. Very few routers do that I've seen - the Linksys WRT54G routers only do it with the 3rd part firmware, not with the factory firmware.

Like many things Apple, I'd expect the amount of configuration options to be somewhat limited and bridging would be one of the first to not be there...

Or, I'd expect the options I need to be there for the end result I want, using industry standards. WDS is a proper industry standard for bridging and extending wireless range and it has 3 modes:

WDS Main - This is the mode the main A base station should be in, and will accept connections from WDS remote and WDS relay clients.

WDS Relay - This mode allows wired and wireless clients on base station B to reach base station A.

WDS Remote - This mode only allows wired clients on base station B to reach base station A. Wireless clients are not allowed to connect here.

Regarding bandwidth cuts with WDS, it only applies to wireless clients not connecting to the main A base station.
source

Cool then. It sounds like this is working as I'd originally hoped. I picked WDS Remote because I simply didn't want another wireless signal, but I wasn't sure if it would eliminate the worry about bandwidth cuts. Excellent.

I haven't put the second router in place yet, so it'll be interesting to see what real-world usage is like, and if it's noticeably different or not...

Do you have 802.11b support enabled with frame protection? Enabling that will cut your throughput significantly even if there aren't any 802.11b clients.