I’d rather use wifi APs connected via PoE to a switch which is connected to the router.
I feel like router and wifi should be separate so that I can expand and upgrade the wifi independently of the router.
This _is_ the objectively better way. It's not practical for a whole host of scenarios, though.
Decent but sort of annoying to set up; https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifiextende... appears to have combined what used to be 2 pages with different instructions, but it still seems to have both sets of slightly different steps. IMHO there really should be a single button in LuCI to make the box just an AP without DHCP/DNS/firewall.
I’ve turned its wifi off, and connected my own setup via the LAN port.
What's the point of separating the router and the switch?
- Switches frequently offer PoE by default whereas routers (especially consumer or PC-grade stuff) would need a PoE adapter
- Devices connected to the switch can communicate directly without the router, saving a hop
- Modern switches may only need to read the first few bytes of the frame before cutting the packet over to the appropriate port, whereas routers tend to need to read the whole packet and apply rules/policy, incurring higher processing costs
An ordinary home LAN may not find any noticeable benefits, but an enterprise setup might benefit.
My router is on a shelf in my unfinished basement, along with the cable modem and a switch, not far from the other household infrastructure. It's a great place for a bunch of cabling (nobody will ever see it unless I deliberately show it to them) and it is trivial to get more wires to that location.
But the basement is a terrible place for a wifi access point, being underground and all.
So for wifi, I've got a fairly unobtrusive access point (a Mikrotik wAP AC) mounted on a central wall on the first floor, with PoE. Unlike the way that home routers are normally used, this access point only has one wire connected to it, and all it will ever need is exactly one wire.
And if I ever want to upgrade that central switch (maybe I grow some plans for some serious NAS usage or something and 10GbE starts making sense), I just... upgrade it. The router stays the same, the wifi stays the same.
If I ever want to make Wifi faster, or add more of it, I just upgrade that part.
All of these components (router, switch, access point) are necessary for the way we commonly use our home networks in 2024. It's nice having things located where they're most useful, and it is also nice being to change individual parts of the system when that is useful.
I'd prefer to separate the two as well, but I'd rather not admin them separately. It'd be convenient to manage them all in one (fully local, non-cloud) place.
But yeah, my ideal setup would be a 10Gbps Ethernet router the upstream Internet connection, firewall, NAT, and LAN DHCP, and then one or more separate Wifi 7 routers whose only job is to bridge transparently to Ethernet but not handle DHCP or NAT.