What's the difference between a router,
a wireless router and a wireless access point?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
Here's the question.
"I've searched your archives and found articles on adding a router to a router.
That's the same thing as adding an access point, right?"
No, it's not.
There's a very confusing usage of terminology.
Imagine that in technology, right?
That is worth investigating,
because the router and access point and wireless, they all get combined
in weird ways that are not necessarily as obvious as you might think.
And some things infer things they're not.
So let's start with a router.
What is a router?
A router is a thing that routes.
What it does is it basically takes input
from one side and sends it to the other side.
You'll notice that most routers have usually an input and several outputs.
And routers have varying degrees of smarts
to direct traffic from one of the multiple outputs to the input and vice versa.
They can be very confusing.
And in fact, the Internet is built on routers.
What's important to understand, though,
is that a router by itself does not imply any wireless technology at all.
In fact, the routers that are the backbone of the Internet aren't wireless.
They have cables connecting to them.
Routers are intelligent devices.
They can inspect the data that's being transferred over them.
They can change it. They can do all sorts of things
that really require a fair amount of intelligence.
They are generally small computers.
They are generally running some variant
of Linux even that allows them to do what it is they do.
But the important thing to understand here
is that the term router does not imply any wireless technology at all.
None. A router,
a true router, does not have wireless.
So wireless access points, sometimes referred to as WAP,
they're the things that provide wireless access to a network that's it.
In many cases, you can get standalone
wireless access points, which have a single Ethernet connection
that eventually ends up connecting to a router and antenna.
The antenna are what provide the wireless
connection, and then the Ethernet cable is what they're connecting to.
A wireless access point does nothing more
than provide wireless access to an otherwise wired network.
So now it gets confusing.
Wireless router.
That is a term you hear a lot.
And in fact, I would claim that most of the devices that you purchase as
a router these days are actually wireless routers.
And there's nothing special about them.
Nothing at all.
They are nothing more than what I've just talked about.
A router without wires and a wireless access point in the same box.
That's it. That's as simple as they are.
That's all you need.
And it makes things much easier.
It's much more convenient to then have
this single box that does everything for most homes.
Now, here's why it matters.
If you have an existing network, you have a router in place,
and it doesn't matter if that's a wired only router or a wireless router.
You've got a router, but you want to extend your wireless network
or perhaps you want to add wireless to your non wireless router.
The way to do that is to purchase one of these standalone wireless access points.
You do not add a router, you add an access point.
In other words, you don't get a wireless router because it's got a router in it.
You get something that is only
the wireless access point of that equation and they're out there.
They're easy to find.
You'll find them on Amazon and on other
stores that then gets connected via the Ethernet cable to your existing router
and provides wireless access from that point on.
The problem is that if you add a router
to an existing network that already has a router, things can stop working.
In other words, devices that are connected through that new second router will
sometimes not connect to sites on the internet.
They will sometimes not connect to other machines on your network.
Remember, one of the things a router does is it protects one side from the other.
That's not something you necessarily want to have happen on your local network.
You probably want all your machines to see
each other so putting them on opposite sides of a second router means they won't.
So like I said the thing to do is to get
yourself a wireless access point that does not include routing functionality.
That way you can extend your network.
You can do all the things you're looking to do without the added complication
but it does require realizing that a router does not imply wireless.
A wireless access point doesn't route
and the two of them put together might be called a wireless router.
And when you have a router in place all
you really need to extend your wireless network is a wireless access point.
I hope that clears up some of the confusion for upcoming updates.
For comments, for related links and more, visit
askleo.com/5056
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.