I am currently in the market for some wireless access points and thought I’d get some suggestions here first. I am currently using some old eero pro’s as access points with a firewalla router. The firewalla isn’t old and I am happy with it so I am not looking to replace it with something at this time.
Are there suggestions for more privacy focused networking equipment? Or is that just a dumb question to ask?
Take this with a major grain of salt as I don’t know much about this. I think that a router isn’t always also a wireless access point. It could just be for wired connections like a switch. Please downvote and correct me if I’m wrong, I really know little about this.
A router bridges your local network and the internet. It decides where to send packets. Typically in residential installations, the router acts as a gateway, acts as a local DHCP server, acts as a DNS server. Kind of all in one.
A access point is a wireless device, which talks to wireless clients, putting their traffic on the network.
Again residential devices, tend to be all in one, everything you would expect in your router/gateway, and an access point.
This is fine for small installations, or people who don’t really care particularly about quality. When you get into dedicated devices, you get higher reliability in your access points, better radios, better firmware. They keep it simple stupid philosophy applies to hardware as well.
If you have a large house, you’ll probably need multiple access points to cover the entirety of the house, and you wouldn’t want each access point to be acting as a gateway, a router, or a DHCP server.
So it’s just like mini routers just dedicated to internet, with better quality and reliability, that connect to the main router when it’s near, but give you a stronger signal?
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Router is a technical term, that many people misuse due to retail advertising.
A router by itself has multiple networks that talks to, and decides what traffic goes to which network.
A switch has one network, but it’s aware of what device is attached to which port, and only forwards packets to the correct port for the device.
The difference between a router and a switch is what level of the network stack they’re working at. But basically switches are dumb and fast, routers are smarter and slower. A fast router tends to be expensive.
Wireless access points typically don’t want to send all of the wired network traffic over the wireless, if it’s not addressed to a wireless client, so it’ll keep track of the hardware address of the clients, and if it sees traffic destined for that hardware then and only then will it switch the packet onto the wireless network. Hence all access points tend to act as a hardware switch.