wireless access point with network switch, is this a router?

[Wombat]

I currently have a router at one end of the house next to the fibre modem thingy (ONT?), and Cat 6 cable to the other end of the house where the TV and music stuff is, and there I have a 6 port network switch to distribute it to the amp, the TV, the Bluray, and across to the utility room for a WAP to connect to the solar inverter, battery inverter, and solar diverter thingy.  The wifi with our new Vodafone router is no better than the pathetic BT one we had (we've told BT to get stuffed on account of constant price rises and generally appalling customer service) and our tablets when used at the far end of the house keep dropping out.  So, if I wanted a wifi access point in thee to give a better signal, and wanted to combine that with the network switch so I don't have too many mains devices plugged in (I am VERY keen on minimising energy usage), does that not constitute a router?  I've still got a surplus BT superhub 2 which they accidentally sent to the wrong address, but postie still got it to us.  Should I reuse this, or will it be a pig to reconfigure without access to BT's infrastructure?  I'm happy to buy a suitable thing, but I'm not sure what I need.  There won't be lots of wifi users, just two of us with phones and tablets, and seamless transition from the main wifi to this would be appreciated. 

When I set up the WAP for the utility room I had to spoof the ID of the old BT router, as I have no way of accessing the setup for the battery's inverter to connect it to a different source, thanks to the idiots who installed it. Yes, Princes LHS, I mean you...

At my last house, the wifi from the Virgin router just reached everywhere including the top of the garden 30m away...

[Kim]

A half-decent router ought to let you configure it to just bridge the Ethernet and WiFi without doing any routing, NAT, DHCP, etc.

No idea if the BT Hub qualifies, it might be horribly locked down or have a Fisher Price user interface or something?

Seamless transition (ie. roaming) is a problem with WiFi, because it wasn't something that was considered when it was originally standardised.  In the absence of some relatively recent roaming extensions, it's up to the client device to decide when to disconnect from one access point and reconnect to another, and most of them are fairly reluctant to do so.  Proper infrastructure setups with multiple access points and a controller (UniFi, Aruba, that sort of thing) are able to bodge around this by various cunning schemes (mostly involving forcibly kicking the client off the weaker AP), though you'll inevitably find that one of your devices still doesn't roam properly (I have countless ESP-based internet-of-shit devices with this problem, fortunately they rarely change physical location, so it's only an issue during AP firmware updates or power failures), or closes its TCP sockets when it does (Natalya's old Moto G did this chronically).

The typical consumer work-around is to configure the access points with different SSIDs, so the user can tell the device which to connect to based on which room they're in at the time (some people seem to do this for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz band, too, presumably because the AP lacks band-steering).  This is the opposite of seamless.  The alternative would be to give them the same credentials, and marvel at the way your phone will try to cling to the last dregs of a -85dB signal from the far side of the house - packet loss and all - when you're standing right next to a perfectly-good AP.

It truly is the Devil's Radio.

[Pickled Onion]

I'd say there's a reasonable chance the BT box will work as it is, BT have form for locking things down but that probably only applies to the WAN part of it. Certainly the switch part will work. For wifi you'll need to get on to its webby interface and configure it so it has the same SSID, turn off DHCP, make sure it's on the same subnet, probably give it a fixed IP, etc, etc.

If it doesn't work, there's bound to be a firmware you can install on to it that does. I did this many years ago with a spare router I had lying around and it's worked flawlessly ever since, but I don't remember where I got the firmware from.

ETA, Kim got in while I was typing, and yes occasionally the clinging-on thing happens (we have fruit things) but mostly they work. When they don't it's a matter of switching airplane mode on and off.

[Wombat]

I have to confess that I'm sceptical of the BT hub being easy to reconfigure (by a numpty like me) for my uses, and I have an aversion to meddling with anything connected with them.

Would it just be simpler to buy an appropriate device?  I've not noticed anything that is effectively just a network switch and WAP combined, hence my confusion as whether that was actually the definition of a router!

I get the point about seamless roaming, and if the new device has a different SSID then really it shouldn't be a problem and tablets and phones should "hopefully" just connect to the better source, but I've definitely experienced the clinging on to a crap signal situation. So far I haven't found how to get to a setting on the Android 12 tablets to persuade it to try the 2.4GHz band if it can't get a decent signal on 5GHz.  Neither phone (both cheapo Chinese Xiaomi things) seems to have any issue with the wifi strength, but the 2 2023 vintage Lenovo P11 tablets, and Mrs W's 2016 vintage Dell Laptop keep dropping off.  My own ancient Sony Viao laptop only does 2.4GHz, and seems to cope OK (but oops, its never been connected to the Vodafone wifi, must go and do that now).

[ian]

My old BT Hub sits under the stairs, connected to the last bit of copper from the cabinet. It does little more than DHCP and piping its bits and bytes to the TP-Link mesh which handles everything wifi related.

Perfect wifi everywhere since I turned it on (it took about five minutes to configure everything since that's not the default), no need to faff or worry about SSIDs, channels, bands etc.

[vorsprung]

the next improvement to Vorsprung towers network will be a wifi mesh network with a node in the green house