I have a wireless router (802.11ac) for internet access which I use directly to connect to with my WLAN devices. I also have small LAN on a gigabit switch. How do I connect the switch to the wireless network?
EDIT1: I want to keep the switch because I get 800 mbps between devices connected to it. I don't want to run a long ethernet cable between switch and router.
62 Answers
I'll assume you couldn't just use one of the ports (uplink or auto-uplink) to wire it to one of the LAN-side connectors on the gateway router (parallel to the wireless router), or to one of the LAN-side connectors on the wireless router (most of them have at least a few in addition to the wifi radios). That would be the easiest way.
Each single wired/ethernet device could be converted to wifi using an ethernet-to-wifi adapter (like an IOGear GWU637). This would mean eliminating the gigabit switch so it could get expensive. Not sure if you could use that kind of device to bridge/connect an entire switch (i.e. "adapt" an uplink port), but I guess you could also try that.
Some mesh wireless network devices have ethernet ports on every node so you might be able use a few nodes of something like a TP-link Deco-5, with one node ethernet connected to the wifi-router or gateway, and the other ethernet connected to the gigabit switch. Presumably, that would carry the traffic from all devices on the switch over the mesh backhaul (but I haven't tried that one either).
The most ambitious, and most flexible option I know of is to load OpenWRT on a Raspberry Pi-4 model B, and configure the 802.11ac wifi adapter as the WAN network, and the Gigabit ethernet as the LAN network. There's a bit of a learning curve to set that up but it might be your best bet for connecting the "dots" you described.
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3I would advise to connect the switch directly to the router. For 1GB-WLAN You can run standard Cat6 patch cable (stranded, AWG24) up to 85m. At least in theory but that depends on the quality of your cable and the devices you are connecting to and on the EMI etc. With consumer devices I will try to keep the length as short as possible. This will give you a much better connection then going through WLAN would (faster an more reliable).
However if you need to connect the switch directly to the WLAN there you could bridge the WLAN to LAN and attach your switch there. Depending on what you already have and how much you want to spend there are a lot of options e.g. via an WLAN to LAN adapter (the only consumer grade one I tried out myself was the TP-Link TL-WR902AC for mobile use), via an WiFi extender that has an Ethernet port or simply through a Windows or Linux machine that brides the the WLAN and Ethernet network card, etc.)
A third option would be to use powerline networking to connect the router to the switch.
