Inside a $5 AliExpress WiFi repeater

From bigclivedotcom.

It’s amazing how cheap a mass produced device like this can be. This is a very basic WiFi repeater that will extend the range of an existing WiFi router by receiving and then retransmitting the data in both directions.

It uses a dedicated router chip with a 16 Mbit flash memory for storing firmware and settings. Other than that the only significant circuitry is the power supply, support components and the complex capacitor/inductor antenna networks.

To use this unit you plug it into a USB power supply or power bank and then look for its network.
It will appear in your list of available WiFi networks as Repeater – XXXXX where the X’s represent part of its random MAC (Media Access Control) address.

If you join that network (no password yet) then it may try to open a settings page. Mine tried to open a Chinese website page (http://zrlogin.cn/) which it couldn’t access due to there being no Internet connectivity yet.
With this router the correct address to type into the browser for setup was 192.168.11.1 which brought up a list of available networks.

This is where things may go wrong. While scanning for available networks it may drop the connection to the repeater and go back to an existing network. You may need to temporarily tell your computer to "forget" the network it keeps reverting back to, so it stays connected to the repeater during the scan.

Once it displays the list of networks available, choose the one you want to extend, and it will ask for its password so it can access it. You then have a choice of either the unit naming the network as the "original name – EXT" and using the same password, or you can use your own choice of network name and password.

At that point the router should be set up and ready to go.

To clear the repeater and revert back to the default settings, press and hold the button on the repeater for 10 seconds while it is powered. When released there will be a pause, and then the lights on the repeater will go out briefly and it will reboot with its default settings.

There is also a WPS easy setup mode where you press the WPS button on your main router if you have access to it, and then the button on the repeater. I’ve not tested that function.

Now about security…. You are using an unbranded unit with no security updates. Only a hardcore networking/coding geek can really know what’s going on in the firmware of a repeater like this.
With modern high speed data connections you wouldn’t even know if info was being sent to a remote server. That’s probably less critical with https secured sites though.
A more devious data harvesting technique might be to swap in a fake sign-in page for a security conscious site and harvest the username and password that way, before "dropping the connection" and then letting you sign in on the real site. But this is where two factor authentication is useful – especially the physical USB key type.

Would I use this unit myself? I reckon that with suitable precautions it would be a handy repeater for travel use, where you needed something small for buffering or bending WiFi around obstructions.
It’s cheap enough that it can also be abandoned if it had to be installed in a hard to access location.

The unit is also cheap enough to use for joke networks with weird or inappropriate names for non-existent IOT bedroom products.

It seems to handle moderate tasks like streaming YouTube video well, although I haven’t tested it for long term stability and crash resistance. I would guess that the bulk of the work is being done by the main router chip after settings have been applied at boot-up, so it should be stable.

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