I’m not a T-Mobile employee (retired teacher), and my DAP1955 works perfectly, using WPA3 (AES) encryption. Not sure what’s deficient about WPA3. Maybe you can contact D-Link? D-Link advertises that the 1610 “Works with any Wi-Fi router” so they ought to be able to help you. How did I get it to work? I just followed the instructions in the User Manual. When I got to the step about connecting to my network, I had to use the D-Link Wi-Fi app installation method, as my Nokia gateway doesn’t have a WPS button. The app talked me through the steps. Easy-peasy.
Edit: Not sure what you mean about no reset on the router. I have reset mine on two occasions over the year-plus that I’ve had it. I find using the web interface the easiest, but you can reset it at the gateway itself, too
In talking with a non-T-Mobile employee about setting up P2P and routers, he told me that the routers and extenders must be compatible with T-Mobile.
I have several extenders that I used with my network prior to switching over to T-Mobile. I can still use them on the old system but T-Mobile does not recognize them. That may be the issue that you are facing.
BTW: I have a reset button on my T-Mobile Gateway. I assume that is what you are referring to. My extenders also have a reset button.
From looking at the D-Link 1610 extender information it appears to ONLY support WPA/WPA2 so the best course of action with any WIFI password is to make it longer and more complex if you have concerns about someone taking the time to try to crack the security of the SSID. Given the D-Link 1610 extender is 802.11ac capable it “should” be able to connect to the T-Mobile 802.11ax gateway. There is no yes/no answer that you want. Having worked as a network escalation engineer for enterprise networks interconnecting different vendor equipment one to another in complicated environments I know all vendors do NOT follow the IEEE recommendations and standards 100%. The IEEE standards are intended to allow for backward compatibility of technology but sometimes this is a challenge.
The D-Link 1610 extender can be a revision 1.0 or a 1.01 from 2017 or 2019 so the revision of the extender may also be a factor that has to be considered. If the extender has not been reset to factory defaults before trying to connect it to the T-Mobile GW use the recessed switch on the bottom of the extender according to D-Link’s process and start from the beginning. It might be there there is a firmware update for the extender that can help improve the success of the endeavor. Making different vendor products communicate sometimes takes extra effort and time. Best of luck getting that to work.
I'm having a similar problem getting my Wavlink Wifi Extender to work with my T-Mo Nokia Gateway in repeater mode. I can get the repeater to connect to the gateway just fine, but it won't connect through to the internet. It seems the gateway won't assign an IP address to the repeater. Any suggestions?
If the Wavlink wifi extender will allow you to do a manual IP address change and save you could provide it with an IP address in the 192.168.12.X/24 subnet. The DHCP scope established on the Nokia, as far as I have been able to determine, appears to run from 101-254. You can safely use an IP address below 101 and not have a conflict with other clients. Of course you have to also exclude the 192.168.12.1 gateway address but that is pretty obvious.
I did a brief search on the web for the extender. One customer review seemed to suggest using it in bridge mode but with that extender then it would be connected with an Ethernet cable. If you are concerned about getting updates to the extender using it in the bridge/AP mode to do so might resolve that. I did not look deep enough to find out if they allow the alteration of the IP address in repeater mode. The YouTube video only covers the use of the wizard. There is the setup gear on the main menu you can check and see if it allows the additional configuration options. The comments from users below the video did not seem to make it that impressive. You can always go to their support site and see if Wavlink support can provide clarification.