Connect OpenWrt router to main router via WIFI

I'm a newbie OpenWrt user and have got a question concerning my configuration:

In the cellar of our house, we've got a Vodafone station which works as a cable modem/router. At the moment, it works in Bridge mode, i.e. only as a modem. One of the Vodafone station's LAN ports is connected to the WAN port of a FritzBox 4040 with OpenWrt 22.03 installed. One of the FritzBox' LAN ports is connected to a powerline adapter which feeds three dumb wireless APs in different parts of the house.

The setup works very well in most respects, apart from the speed: Due to the powerline, latency can be quite high, and download speed is < 50 Mbit/s (the cable connection has 250 Mbit/s download/50 Mbit/s upload, which I verified connecting via ethernet cable to the FritzBox). As an alternative, I activated the FritzBox' 5Ghz Wifi radio and connected it to a relay-wifi-bridge positioned in the basement. The bridge device offers 2,4Ghz Wifi and additionally connects to a powerline adapter (I removed the powerline adapter in the cellar first). This step has improved speed and reduced latency a bit.

As the bridge device is a GL-Inet AR750 router which only has 100 MBit LAN ports, I now thought of another alternative: I plan to put the Vodafone Station into router mode and activate its Wifi. I would like to position the FritzBox in the basement and use its 5GHz radio to connect to the Vodafone Station. That said, I don't want to use it as a repeater/relay bridge, but as a router (I installed Adblock and Stubby on my FritzBox). Is this setup possible? E.g. can I just scan for the Wifi of the Vodafone station on the Fritzbox to create a new WWAN interface? And how do I proceed from there?

Thanks for your help!

Yes it is possible and there are instructions in the wiki.

1 Like

Thanks trendy. If I set the FritzBox up according to these instructions, would it still do NAT, DHCP and DNS queries, and would Stubby and Adblock still work?

Yes, it is basically another interface on the wan zone, so it is completely isolated.

Great; I'll give it a got then. Thanks a lot!

1 Like