Turn Your Old Router Into a Highly Compatible Access Point

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Do you have any badly behaved IoT devices? You know, the ones that can't seem to connect to your WiFi, or once they do connect, quickly fall off the network? Or worse yet, the device might go comatose and need rebooting frequently?

For example, I had a hell of a time keeping my BirdBuddy online. It just kept going "offline" with little information as to what was wrong. What finally worked for me: configuring an old unused router to be a highly-backwards-compatible Wireless Access Point.

My "main" WiFi network consists of several Ubiquiti APs. Yes, Ubiquiti has had some problems in the past, and I'm not sure if I were starting from scratch Ubiquiti is what I would choose, but it's what I have. It has many of the latest and greatest WiFi features, including WiFi 6 support, multiple bands, and the network and coverage works great for my laptop and my mobile devices.

But those fancy features work against compatibility with IoT devices, which usually have dead simple WiFi stacks integrated by the lowest paid intern at the IoT company. That WiFi stack may glitch when dealing with 5Ghz, or roaming, or 802.11ax, or whatever. So make life easy on the IoT device: take your old WiFi router out of the closet (the one you kept "just in case"), put it into WiFi Access Point mode, turn off as many features as you can, and have your IoT devices connect to it instead. Now those underpowered and undertested WiFi stacks on the IoT devices aren't stressed out.

As it turns out, I had a spare TP-Link WR841N router. This device was first available in 2011, so it's not exactly cutting edge gear. It supports at most 802.11n, so I didn't have to disable the newer protocols. If it supported 5Ghz, I would have disabled that as well. After checking for CVEs and patching to the latest firmware which (hopefully) fixes them all, I followed my advice above, putting the device in AP mode and creating a new, unshared SSID and password.

The proof is in the pudding. After connecting to this dead simple AP, my Bird Buddy is now rock solid. I have several other IoT devices that are now also using this AP with much success as well. If you've got that old unused router, why not give it a try?