Hi, I'm in the process of moving over from adsl to Telkom LTE uncapped.
Great move
I have the B315 router from Telkom and my existing router is a Asus N66U.
That N66U looks like a good piece of kit !
I want to use my N66U for wifi as the range is better than the Huawei.
Good plan.
The Huawei modem/routers are best used as plain modems, with some other downstream device doing the heavy lifting as a full-featured router, Wireless Access point, firewall and Gigabit switch.
What I was planning to do is to DISABLE DHCP on the Asus and use the
B593 as the "main" router with the N66U acting as a wireless access point. However, most of the posts I have seen online suggest doing just the opposite - using the N66U as the main router, disable DHCP on the B315 and connect B315 to the WAN port of the Asus.
(an example:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...ion-thread?p=16462533&viewfull=1#post16462533)
My question is - why are the majority of posts suggesting the 2nd way of doing it and not my way?
I presume you mean B315, not B593 ?
Compared to a full-featured router and/or proper Wireless Access Point, the B593's Wi-Fi performance and firmware functionality (eg port-forwarding and firewall) are somewhat underwhelming. If/when you try to use it as such, you'll start to discover its limitations. Although the B315s has some plus points (eg 2100MHz TDD coverage and Gigabit LAN ports), it probably has similar limitations and the firmware seems even more dysfunctional (eg very limiting IP and DHCP options).
For that reason it generally works better to let the Huawei do what it does best - act as a 4G/LTE modem - and leave the routing and Wi-Fi functions to a dedicated router/WAP device.
It seems the 2nd way introduces double NAT which can cause issues? There must be something I am missing?
No, you're not missing anything, you're quite right.
Using the Huawei B593/B315 upstream in this mode creates a "2-loop" scheme which requires different subnets on the WAN and LAN sides. While you certainly
can use it in this way, it introduces 2 levels of firewall and 2 levels of port-forwarding.
That's why many folks prefer to use the B593's DMZ mode and place the downstream router in the DMZ. You still need different subnets, but that way everything gets forwarded directly to the downstream router with no firewall or NAT issues.
I did try it and the Asus can only pickup the NAT IP given by the B315. It is clever enough though to give a warning that the DDNS IP address is invalid...