Access Point mode in USB WiFi adapters in Windows

Question

Some USB Adapters, for example, many of the chips such as RTL8191SU, have option to set mode to either Station, or Access Point, or Soft AP.

In Station Mode, it acts just as a WiFi client. In Access Point Mode, the adapter kind of acts as a Wireless Router. In Soft AP Mode, the adapter acts as a WiFi client, but, it uses a Microsoft Virtual WiFi Adapter, and creates something called hostednetwork.

My question is mainly concerned with the second option, the Access Point Mode and not the Soft Access Mode.

In Windows 7, the Wireless Utility Tool has all above options to select, but, none of those utilities can be installed in Windows 10. It says unsupported OS, if one tries to run them. But, Windows 10 does automatically find and install the drivers. In my opinion, there should exist some common set of APIs or commands one can use to manually set those options previously available. But how? Are there any standards?

I can create Soft AP, using netsh hostednetwork commands, which is equivalent to Soft AP Mode. However, my primary purpose was to use the USB Adapter just as an Access Point and not as Soft AP Mode.

The difference is that: Access Point Mode allows to share internet from another WiFi Adapter, but, Soft AP mode uses a single Adapter and the same adapter is used as client and access point.

I searched thoroughly, but did not find anything on the commands, tools, or utilities to manually configure Access Point without those provided Utilities (for example in Windows 10).

Are there any command line options, tools, utilities, or third party applications that allow to configure an adapter as an regular Access Point and not the Soft AP?

Answer 1

Here are my findings:

1) Access point mode in most adapters is similar to Ad-Hoc network in Windows 7, and does not work in windows 10 as it does not seem to support Ad-Hoc mode.

2) Soft AP is the hostednetwork and it is supported in windows 7 and 10.