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Good evening,

I recently ordered a mesh system that consists of four routers to cover all rooms in my house with (hopefully) decent WiFI 6 signal. Apparently this system can only mesh when the main unit is used as a router ( = not in a bridge mode). Otherwise it would act as a number of disconnected access points which may make an automatic switching between routers difficult (for example, when walking between the floors, or going outside to the garden, while still watching Netflix on your phone). Scrolling through this forum I’ve learnt that T-Mobile distributes their TV / VOIP / Management via different VLANs. A couple of routers were mentioned in a guide (Draytek and something else) that may replace a standard Zyxel T50. There was also a guide to set up USG for this purpose.

Both USG and Draytek were able to deal with VLAN’s internally. My ordered routers, apparently - not. There were other solutions as well, DMZ, port forwarding, etc, which I even started considering…

While still waiting for my order, I’ve decided to test something. I took a switch, set up port 1 as a trunk port for VLAN’s 100, 300, 640. Connected an ethernet cable from a mediabox to port 1. Specified port 2 as an access port. Connected my (old outdated) Apple TimeCapsule to it, connected using DHCP, got ip address 85.144.somehting.something, selected router mode “DHCP and NAT”, set DNS to 8.8.8.8 and got the Internet. The speed was also ok.

So now the question comes: since my knowledge is very limited (limited to those random YouTube videos I watched), am I missing something? Is it dangerous to connect like this? It looks like this method is suitable for, basically, /any/ router out there. And if it is indeed the case, what would be the rationale for someone (in similar situation) to bother with DMZ (although, it is just one line to set up) or port forwarding?

Kind regards,

As I am getting no reactions, I guess there is nothing wrong with such a setup...

That’s good to know (maybe for someone who wants to use their own routers for whatever reason without much headache).

It is ok to connect such devices to be better able to get what you want.

Be aware that you may encounter conflicts when the connected router also distributes local ip addresses (DHCP).

Normally spoken you may want to use the bridge mode if that is available for your modem/router.
An alternative is to set the connected router's ip as DMZ and enforce the ip with mac-binding. 

If you care harder you may want to check this topic; "Glasvezel] Draytek vervangen met je eigen router (met VLAN) | T-Mobile Community (t-mobile.nl)

@pimesaw 

Here is even a topic on TMT, how to make a setup to use a non-vlan capable router.

Opinions are divided about this kind of setup, because the IPTV box is more ore less directly connected to the WWW .. so without any firewall protection. Security wise for me, this is not my preferred option.

Better is to buy a VLAN capable router, so all your network is behind a firewall.

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