Archer C80 in WDS bridge mode with EE smart hub
Hi,
I've just moved over to EE broadband and have an EESmart Hub plus.
I need to connect some wired connections distant to the smart hub and want to extend wifi signal in that of the house so previously I have set up a wifi router in bridge mode to provide the connection. which worked OK with my old BT router.
However I have run into issues with the new EE smart hub. The router I want to use as a bridge is a TP-Link Archer C80 which supports bridge connections by WDS.
I have run through the setup on the C80 (essentially following this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zDveYYo2JY i.e. new LAN IP, disable DHCP and then connect by wifi to the smart hub). The C80 reports that it is connected to the smart hub, however, there is no internet access when I connect a client to the C80.
When I look at the EE smart hub connections I can see the C80 as connected (although curiously the mac address has changed from 3C:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee to 3A:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee - all digits the same, but for the first number), but there doesn't seem to be an IP address assigned by the smart hub. When I look at the details the IP address is reported as N/A. I'm pretty sure this is the reason why any device connected to the C80 isn't getting access to the internet or assigned an IP by the EE smart hub.
I've tried a couple of troubleshooting sanity checks. First is that when I use the C80 to connect to my phone's hotspot rather than the EE smart hub it acts perfectly as a bridge. Secondly, I have a TPlink wifi extender (RE220) and that seems to work fine and gets assigned an IP address. I've also tried a few different LAN IP addresses, either within or outside the smarthubs DHCP range to make sure there are no conflicts. A ping to the C80 LAN IP, when connected to the smart hub failed. I found some suggestions that security settings may affect IP assignment, so I've tried this with the WPA2-PSK turned off, but that didn't affect anything. I am going to try and see if I can get it to work in wired mode - but not had a chance to do that yet.
Has anyone any ideas on how I can get the EE smart hub to play nicely with the C80? It seems really strange that both devices report a connection but the EE smart hub isn't assigning the C80 an IP address.
Archer C64 supports WDS feature if it's in Router Mode (details):
For best resulrs as I mentioned in my first post, it's better to use a RE or a router in RE mode like Archer C54, because WDS feature may not always be compatible between different or even the same vendor.