I jave a Netgear WN604 access point and I want to use it as a wireless repeater. Is that possible? The options are Wireless bridge, Point to multi point bridge and wireless client.
A wireless bridge is a repeater, so yes.
Nope. A wireless bridge associates to an AP and passes packets from the wireless interface to the ethernet interface (and the reverse) without routing - Layer 2.
A Wireless Repeater extends the range of a wireless network by re-transmitting packets on the wireless interface only. This forces the network into half-duplex mode and reduces throughput.
This Netgear link shows the difference.
It also looks like Netgear doesn’t support Wireless Repeater functionality on this model. Third party firmware like dd-wrt would be an option but it is not supported on your hardware.
Sorry
Si
A home router will usually “bridge” traffic from wireless to wired and vice versa; however, it does not have the smarts to decide “I can see laptop A but the other wifi point can’t”, so it does not have the programming to receive and rebroadcast packets from some wireless devices to others. The other issue is that standard wifi is a master-slave model; when you have a router, everyone else talks to it, it is the boss.
Bridge mode you can connect one wired network to another through an air gap, and the router knows it is talking to a peer.
However, repeater requires a mixture of the two modes - bridge to the other router AND act as a master to all client devices. The home router obviously does not have this. It might be possible to set up a bridge from your original base to one router, then hook it back to back with a wire to a third router that distributes the network. Note though, this means the base is not a wifi hotspot (Access Point = AP), jut a bridge. to get wifi at both ends, you need ***four ***routers - a wifi spot at each end, and a pair bridging those.
And- the two hotspot AP’s should have different SSID names so you can’t just walk around and autoconnect back and forth like a cell tower; (although I’ve never tested this). To get that sort of functionality, you proper repeaters.
The simpler more basic equipment could be stuff like this:
Ubiquity’s Unifi pucks have the inherent ability to repeat from other pucks. I haven’t found it useful as it reduces the bandwidth for both source and slave puck, but it can be done.