Hello everyone,

a few years ago, I bought this very typical 802.11 repeater: https://gembird.com/item.aspx?id=7921
It works as a repeater/wired client or AP reasonably well, given its price. Let's call it "Cheapy".

I discovered that Cheapy is capable of acting as a transparent station bridge when connected to an equally typical ISP-provided CPE (from ZTE) and observed it using the 4-address format and passing both IPv4 and IPv6.

A hAP ac, however, does not seem to be able to do that. According to https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:W ... tion_Modes, modes station-bridge and station-wds are not available when connecting to anything other than a RouterOS AP.

I would like to use this to connect to a 2.4 GHz AP, then repeat it over both 2.4 and 5 GHz (which repeater mode cannot do). I understand that the non-standardised nature of 802.11 bridging does not make things easy, but I was wondering what it is that Cheapy does better/different than MikroTik.

Any insights are appreciated. Thanks!

Just guessing: could be that Cheapy supports multiple vendor-proprietary extensions and can guess (from available beacon information) about which to use with particular AP it connects to. Support for different extensions (I guess there are not that many after all) isn't too hard to implement and it's a must for products whose sole function is wireless bridging. For products (such as MT APs) where bridging is a bonus functionality I guess some vendors are reluctant to implement it. Specially so as it's probably necessary to do some reverse-engineering and by doing it vendors might enter into gray IP zone ...