I just bought a D-Link DWL-G730AP travel router. Very sweet and very small. Can run off AC or a USB port.

It has three modes, two of which are router or access point. They both seem to do the same thing. What is the difference?

I will be using it in hotel rooms to take a wired Ethernet connection and turn it into a wireless signal that I am my employees can access.

Think of an access point as a repeater from the network you are hooking up to, the network will give you an IP address, and there usually is no firewall protection.

A router is more sophisticated, it grabs an IP address with the port attached to the network, then it gives it's own set of IP addresses that attach to it. Usually has firewall, and a set of security settings.

The main difference is in what the features each supports. An access point can only attach individual computers to a network. So say in my office, for example, I can put it in Access Point mode, and everybody can get on my network.

A router can connect computers on different networks. If say in the office, I wanted to pulg in a cable modem or whatever to get on the internet, I would have to be running it as a router, because the access point couldn't pass traffic from my side (the PC's or notebooks or whatever) over to the other side, the hotel network or whatever.

So if you are planning on sharing a connection to the internet with it, it has to be running as an router. If you already have an internet connection someplace with another router on the network, you can run it as an access point, but in your case you will need to run it as a router.

To be more correct, a router routes packets. And an access point allows access to a network. An access point can contain a router function, but they are themselves discrete functions.

An IP (Internet Protocol) router routes packets of data from one IP network to another. In the case we are referring to here, it routes private IP address that you use in your home or business, to public Internet addresses that can go anywhere in the world. These types of routers also contain a separate discrete function called Network Address Translation (NAT). That function translates the public address to the private one for IP sessions.

I just bought one too. What a neat little toy!
Based on the diagrams that D-Link provides, it looks to me like the difference is that you set it as a router when it's directly connected to a modem, and as an access point when it's connected to a network that already has a router in it. I see from the manual that in this mode the default for DHCP is disabled--so the DHCP is being handled by the network's router. But I haven't tried it out yet in that manner. And I don't understand why there's an option to enable DHCP in this mode; it seems to me that AP mode with DHCP enabled is equivalent to router mode.

In your hotel room you are going to get a private IP address. In order for others to connect using the same IP address you need DHCP. If it is Wireless enabled then you need to know SSID and all your employees should use the same SSID to acess and when their WL cards acess the AP then they will get a IP address which is maped to the hotel IP address given to you for your room.

If you are in a hotel with wireless internet access can you use this device to create your own private wireless network so you only have to purchase one MAC address of access from the hotel? More and more hotels seem to be going wireless these days...

No, DHCP provides addresses for PC's. It doesn't allow everyone to use the same IP address. That would be a function of NAT. DHCP = Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.

I would do it if I wasn't using DHCP in an office (everybody had a static IP address) and wanted to have an area where say people from other offices wanted to get on the network. They could stroll into a conference room, turn on and connect without having to be assigned an address.

OK, let me see if I can explain this a bit further

An Access point, is just like a hub, it allows traffic to go wireless between the wireless cards and the wired network

A DHCP Server assigns internal IP addresses that only work in the wireless portion on the network.

If you were to activate an access point with DHCP, the access point would assign IP addresses, but it wouldn't be able to connect to the other network, since it wouldn't know how to handle the traffic

That is where a router comes into place, the router knows how to route the traffic, when the internal addresses that were given to by the DHCP server request to go to the internet.

Hope this clears it up a little

Much better jfe. But one more point to be cautious on. DHCP acts upon broadcast requests. When your PC boots up with DHCP enabled, it send out broadcasts that any DHCP server will respond to. Broadcasts as the word implies go everywhere in a network except through a router (unless the router is specifically configured to help it through). So when you turn on DHCP, you can sometimes accidently screw up a network in that other PC's or PDA's will get their address from your server rather than another more appropriate server.

However if the wireless access point has a built in router function enabled and DHCP function, you shouldn't have to worry.

Yes, and that is one of the reasons I bought this little gadget. Hotels are increasingly charging for each MAC address signing onto the network.

If I understand it correctly, in my scenario, if the device is set to Access Point, all of the laptops in my room would hook-up to the Internet through the hotel's wireless network with their own MAC address. Each would then be charged for the access.

However, if the device is set to router mode, the hotel network only sees the MAC address of the router and charges for one connection. All of the laptops connect to the router, which dynamcially assigns addresses to the laptops. The hotel only sees the single MAC address of the router.

In my case, looks like I'll be using router mode.