[masraum]

Most soho style APs have a "WAN" side and a LAN side. The WAN is usually just another ethernet, but not in the same VLAN / broadcast domain as the LAN side and any associated wired ports.

I wouldn't expect a SOHO device to respond on the WAN side with IP addressing for the LAN side. How would anything route if both sides of the AP/router had the same address scheme?

Many/most SOHO APs have a few wired LAN ports. If you used one of those wired ports then yes, the thing will respond with addresses from the DHCP pool.

I would think that there would be 2 ways to set this up. AP setup the same as a home AP/router so that it has a static address from your class C and then NATs all of the wireless hosts on the way through which will then be NATed again on their way to the 'Net. Or, slightly more complicated but better, turn NAT off on the AP, still, of course, use a static IP from the LAN subnet on the WAN side. The thing about this method is that you'll also need to make changes to the primary router. The primary router would have to be told to NAT the subnet that is behind the AP (not a big deal), and a route to the wireless subnet will have to be added to the primary router.

I suppose it's possible that your guy is right depending upon what sort of AP he's talking about, but my gut tells me that he either doesn't understand what's going on or isn't that knowledgeable.

The dashed red line indicates what should be a separation between the WAN and LAN/WLAN. Essentially, the WAN port should be in a separate VLAN from the LAN/WLAN and should therefore not provide an address on that side.