Deep Dive - TP-Link Omada 4G Failover Setup, inside/outside wireless and a bridge!
Hi, and welcome to another one of the Tech Geeks videos. Today I'm actually going to be doing a TP-Link set up for a customer, so I thought I'd actually video how I approach this and what I do, because it's an interesting project. It might be something similar to what you're looking to do. So maybe there's a little bit of gold in there.
Now, there are many ways to approach this. But hopefully it gives you an idea of how I will. And I'm going to show you the steps of all the equipment that we're using, how it's all plug together, and ultimately how we then configure it in the software as well. So hopefully that is going to be useful to you. So as we know with TP-Link Armada there are several ways to control and manage this.
Either we need a piece of software free software that needs to run on a computer in your network. You can have a hardware controller on site, you can have a router with the controller built into it, or you can use, the free cloud, and paid cloud service. There are several variations, because TP-Link is sort of in a little bit of a flux of how that operates at the moment. So we're going to be basing this on an on site controller, and we're going to be using this. This is a little, TP-Link OSI 200.
This is pre powered. So we're gonna have a TP-Link Poe switch running. This to give it power. But this is going to be our brains. This is where we're going to do all of our configuration. Maybe just pop this down here so you can just have a little look at, that.
So we have our Poe in, here. We don't need anything more than that because all of this is not a router or anything else. It literally is a software controller.
the next part of this is going to be, router. And I've chosen this, which is the, ERP, 706, w 4G. Just hold that up there for you. So this is an Ax 3000 router. It can do,
a total of about 3000mbps. Now, that split between the 2.4 and the five gigahertz, as you know, with 2.4, we can only get a speed of around about 600mbps.
So theoretically, this can do then the rest of it 2.4 gigabits a second in the five gigahertz frequency. That's probably not relevant, because I've only got a 100 Meg internet connection.
But at least we know we've got some future proofing on this. So this is a metal construction. We've got these, 4G antennas on either side to give us good reception. We've got our wireless here at the back. Our Micro-SIM slot is here where we're going to put our 4G, SIM in that can handle up to about 300 mega second, obviously, but it depends on the service and how close you are to the tower.
Our NBN connection is going to go into here, and then we're going to be able to use this because this is in the House. This is then going to go on to our network switch and give us some wireless again with inside our main, property. So then inside our main property, obviously our, router is going to give us some wireless and we just want to extend that a little bit further. And so we're going to be using one of these.
This is the EAP 610. It's a ceiling mount access point that you can see here. It is again, pre powered. So we're going to mount that somewhere else in the house. A little bit further away from the router that we're looking at to give us some good Wi-Fi coverage with inside the house.
That will obviously be connected back, to our TP-Link switch that's going to be powering it. Then we want to get the connectivity, outside. So we're going to be doing two things.
And there are two ways of doing this. So we're actually going to be using these two this is the EAP 215 bridge kit. These are able to do point to point. So we're gonna have one of these on the outside of the house, one of these on the outside of the demountable, the dongle pointing at each other. That's going to give us our Wi-Fi connectivity down. Now, these can also be outdoor wireless access points.
But we're not going to be using that feature because we do have some 2.4GHz, cameras. The customer has and these only give out a wireless at five gigahertz. So it's probably not quite what we're going to be needing. So we're actually also going to mount this in EP 610 outdoor, which is an outdoor access point.
We're going to mount that outside the property, to give them really good outside wireless. So we obviously run from our main router, a cable out, to one of these, we are actually going to use the spare ports in the bottom of one of these. Maybe just hold this up to the camera here, to run out, to. So we only have to have one cable out and that will split out to be able to power, our big outdoor access point. And we'll show you how that all cables together in the video as well. So that's going to go on the out of the side of the property, pointing down to the Donga.
Then on our demand table, the dongle, we're going to have another one of these mounted pointing back to the house. And that's going to link our connectivity. All the way down to, the donga from the house.
And now we've got connectivity down there. What we're going to then do inside that dongle, which is the Home Office, we're going to put one of these. This is an IP, 650, slightly different from the six tens we're working. 650. This is only just newly released. We're so excited about to use this because we've been waiting for these in the TP-Link, range. This is the desktop model.
So this is a little desktop device. We have four Ethernet ports on this side. So this will be connected, to our outside, access point or our access point bridge wired back to this, into, port one. Over, here.
If I hold this down here, maybe port one over here. And then that will give us three wired Ethernet ports as well as really good wireless six coverage, from this device as well. And that will give us the end of our chain and give us a Wi-Fi right the way down in the dongle there. So we should have given Wi-Fi and sorted that in the house.
We should then be able to connect it to an outside access point and give us good outside coverage, and then extended it all the way down to the Donga and given them Wi-Fi inside with this beautiful desktop unit and wired if they want it there as well. So there's going to be quite a few components to join together. I want to show you in due course how that all fits together. But I wanted to show you all of the bits and pieces before we set them on the bench, and then show you how they all connect up.
So let's get into doing the actual configuration and the wiring, and then we'll show you step by step of how we make this work. Okay, so we have amassed quite a lot, as you can see, as we've opened all of the boxes. And I've shown you some of the bits that are here.
We are not going to necessarily use all of the pieces from the boxes, for instance, like an access point like this comes with a power pack as well. We're going to be actually probably pre powering that, from our switch here. So I'm going to clear the decks a little bit. We are going to then start building this up as we add each little bit. I've got a power bar over here.
I've got a couple of Ethernet cables. This one's going out to the internet. And this one's going out to the computer I'm going to be using to show you all about it.
Now, there are lots of different ways to set this up. It's going to be quite a long video. I want to do you show you speed tests and how to optimize your wireless at the same time.
So please do that. You use the chapters in this video. Hopefully you'll be able to find then relevant areas that you want to learn a little bit more about. So let's start to clear a little bit of the area and get some of these bits and pieces plugged in together. So we're going to start like I said with our router, our router is obviously our most important bit. And there are a number of different ways of doing this. We are going to set this up, with the router being our control.
Right. And you could set this up with the 4G active to start with. I'm going to set this up with the NBN or our, fixed internet connection first, and then we're going to build it on from there and get 4G, running a little bit later on. So we're going to take our device.
We have got obviously our Wan port on here, multiple LAN ports. So let's get the power plugged in the back here. Firstly send here. All right. So let's get the power. Connected up onto here.
This unit does take about 3 or 4 minutes to boot. So do be patient till the lights come on permanently. I'm going to plug our wan connection, our internet connection in the green port.
And then over here, I'm going to plug our computer. I'm going to be using a laptop or a computer. Not going to give you a screen grab from show you how we get it all set up. I'm going to plug that into the first port. There.
Now look, like I said, there are a number of ways to set this up, but you will probably find it a lot easier if you start off by using a computer. Once we've got this, actually configured, we will join it to, the wider TP-Link cloud so you can manage it from the app from wherever you are. But as a starting point, this is the way we want to actually get this going.
So we're going to let that boot. But as it boots we're going to get a couple of other devices connected to this. We are going to connect up our power switch, which we will need to run our, little AC controller in a moment.
So let me go and grab a couple of cables. I'll be back in a moment when we can start connecting. That into place.
All right. I knew there'd be something. Probably that I would end up, missing. So I've grabbed a whole lot of short cables. You'll probably have longer ones in this instance, so our switch.
Our switch is going to provide power, to, all of the devices. This has got, four ports of power. It's got 65W of power. That's important because each access point, or that we're going to be using uses a certain amount of power. So we need to make sure we have enough power allocated from our switch.
So these are probably used about eight watts each. So obviously we had four of those running we need 32W of power. So this has got 65. So we're ample on that. Interesting thing with this is actually comes with a really large, power pack. But that's obviously because the extra wattage it needs. So let's just get that plugged in as well here to our, power board.
And we can start that, powering up. And we'll now need to actually connect that this device here, up to, switch as well. So of course, you could have, up to our router. You could have obviously plugged this directly into the switch, and then could have plugged the, other, our laptop or our computer into that. But I will leave this plugged into here. It doesn't really make that much difference.
So I'm going to use the Non-Po ports one of the ones up at this end here. So that we don't waste our power. We, ports. And I'm going to plug that now into one of the other spare, LAN ports here on our controller.
All right. So that has given us some spare network ports. Try and clear these cables out of the way a little bit so that it's still accessible. And you can see what's going on.
And we should hopefully now start to see that this is starting to power up. The next thing that we're going to need to do on here is we need to power our controller. This is not a router.
This is literally a control device. It's going to allow us to manage the router. And the switch that we've got here on all the other bits and pieces that we've got in this set up. So we need to actually power this from, our little switch. So if we take our, little I'm going to use an orange cable here.
We're going to plug that in here to, one of the, spare power ports up at this end. So when I plug that in and we're going to plug that in here, to, Ethernet port and port here, we should then find in a moment. There we go. This has got power.
So this is now receiving power. From the switch. The switch is connected to our router. And then out to the internet. Now, there will be some things that you, in this initial stage that, might not mean that you've got internet access if your IP address that's on here.
So maybe you've connected to Starlink or whatever. This by default has A19 2.168.1. IP address. And I'll show you a little bit more about that once we hop onto the computer. So that could mean because Starlink, for instance, has 1921681., here. So if we plug this directly into Starlink, it'll look like this set up doesn't work.
So we're going to be connecting to that this and changing the IP range first so that we get everything as it needs to be. But we needed to get this in this initial stage. And a computer connected to what we call the LAN side, the local area network, b LAN side of the router. Before we could actually get any of that set up. Done.
So those are our main components. Now set and ready to go. Let's have a little look. We've got all of our light showing quite comfortably on here. We've got power coming out of this one. Let's have a little look.
Our lights here are now on the router. We've got a wine connection. Both of our local area networks are connected, and our AC 200 is started up. So it's probably time that we can now jump onto the computer and, start to do some of the configuration. And then we're going to slowly come back and add a little bit more into this setup as we go along. Okay, so let's, come to the computer here now.
So we're going to do this. Like I said, this computer is connected to the LAN port. Of our, TP-Link, router, RA 3000 4G router. And obviously the switch is connected and the AC controller is connected. What I first like to do is check that I've got an IP address. Check. That doesn't conflict with anything else.
Like I said, I will show you in case it does. So I've just gone to command CMD and hit enter. I can toggle the command called ipconfig and this will show me the IP address. And really what we're looking for is this is what we call the IP range. So 192168.
And this zero here is important by standard a lot of routers use 192.168.1 in here for instance Starlink does. So if the LAN IP address here was 1921681.103, then this would look like it wasn't working and wasn't going to connect to the internet. And we would need to change its IP address, which we'll do, in a few minutes to show you how you would go in that process. But in this instance, we're all okay.
And I know that the, this won't conflict with what's connected. So we can then choose a command ping 8.8.8.8, which is Google's DNS server. And this shows me I've got internet connection. So that is my starting, point in the journey. Now, this default gateway is actually the IP address of the router.
So up here, if in the browser I'm gonna put 192.168.0.1. And this is now going to allow the interface for the controller to log in. So in the first thing we want to set this up, do make sure you remember what this is going to be.
I'm just going to see if I can if it'll allow me, please enter at least six characters using. All right. So, let's think of something that I can actually remember. So, we can end up doing this over and over again if we're not, careful.
All right, let's see if that worked. So now we've set this up as, as our default way to get into the device. I'm not going to save that password, obviously.
And so maybe do start this with a fairly simple password. You can always change it later. We are going to need to add this to the controller. So we will need to know what it is. But I just want to show you that you can obviously just do this. Ready and running.
I'm not going to do a quick set up because I don't really want to have much done on here. What I want to just show you is we're getting an internet connection here. All right.
4G modem isn't connected and running because I've not put a SIM in, which will do. Later on. And what I really want to do is I want to be able to find the IP address of, the AC controller so we can connect to that as well. So, let's have a little look. We've got a few settings that we can do in here.
Maybe it's in here in LAN and Dhcp list because it's going to get an IP address in the same way. As you can see, I've got a few devices here already on this network. So here's our AC 200 controller and it's on 102. So we're going to use that IP. Like I said, there are lots of different ways of doing this.
But I'm going to use this as the way, of making this, fairly easy to go. So I've now got this IP address, and I'm going to put this up in our web browser here. And this will allow us to, get access hopefully to the OSI controller.
And that's what's going to actually govern the rest of our network. And once that's installed and running, then we're going to do everything with the Amada controller. So this is our first stage.
We're going to log in. It's going to ask us a few questions about getting started. So we're going to get started. Just choose agree down here.
So we're going to just choose administrator. Name. This is up to you. So I'll put my name in here.
Maybe we just put our email address in here. There we go. I'm going to put a password in here. I'm actually just making this match. The one that I did on the router.
Now we can link this to our TP link. Log in. What does this do? This allows us to actually remotely manage, this device from the Amada app from anywhere we are, as long as our AC controller can see, actually out to the internet. I'm not going to do that for the moment.
I will add that in a little bit later on. I just want to be able to do everything on this side. And if you didn't have internet access for some reason, you wouldn't be able to finish that piece off. So really, we want to just actually, do this.
I think that, we will just call this, I will just call this TTG. All right. So hopefully this will now go through and do a little bit of an essential. And it's going to ask us to do a new config. If you had a backup. In your scenario.
In my scenario I don't I'm going to do a new configuration. So let's call this TTG, for or for G. Test.
And I'm in Australia. So let's just get this, typed in here, am I time zone? All right. Let's just see. We're in a plus ten, I think.
And depending on how this is listed in here. Brisbane. There we go. I don't want to join the experience team. So we're going to do next site name this.
This is my location I'm going to call it spin all like we do in most of our videos. And again Australia time zone. This is just it provisions it with some of the information in the way that we want it to be.
But all of this is controllable later on. What is this? This is a home, set up device account. So this is, the username and password that's going to be given to each device when it's adopted. So that will be the access points, the switches. Everything along those lines. And it's worthwhile again setting this to something.
And you can, use this later on. So I'm actually setting it to the same as my, admin username password. It is only used if you need to log in to those devices individually, which you shouldn't have to.
If you do have a problem, you normally just factory reset them. And then reset. You can then re adopt them and add them to it. In this scenario we're going to choose home.
So some of this is always going to be different for for each one of us as we do it. Maybe I have to put a dot to put a dot there. Here we go. So it's already found this router. I'm going to not add that in just now, because I want to be able to get all the way through to, setting this, up. So. So I will add that in a little bit later, because we will then need to override these settings in due course.
So, I'm just going to just check actually, in fact, what we're going to do is we will set this up right from the beginning because it is the router. So we're going to choose this device. We're going to go forward to next. If you do not have an A mod a gateway or Monica has been configured with one settings, skip this.
If you. Wan setting overrides. All right. So if you do not have an A multi gateway or your multi gateway has been configured with one settings, please get this set up with one setting overrides. Disable the one. Setting up the newly adopted a modern gateway in standalone mode will take effect on the controller.
When the one setting overrides is turned on, the gateway will use the configurations on the controller after adoption. Please make sure the configurations are correct. So I want to set this up. Correctly in the way that we want this to do.
So we just need to see what we've got. We've got A706 by the looks of it. So with this one, here, it's up to us what wine ports, and everything else. So this is standard.
So what we're now doing is because at the moment, this has some basic settings in it. When we adopt it, we actually want the controller to manage all of those settings. So this is a little bit tricky when you do this, when you've already got when you now setting up a new, a mod, a router in this set up.
So we just want to make sure that this goes through, correctly. So we've got a normal wine. Wine, is a faster or a transceiver port that you can have in there. But at this moment in time, all we need to worry about is the wine. We can see it's on dynamic.
It's going to pick up an automatic IP address if you're using different one of these. Sometimes NBN has this. Then you might need to change that this is all correct.
And as it should be. I just want to see I just want why is it not allowing us to move? Everybody's pretty screaming at me saying I can see it. Oh, I think we just need to apply this on here. So that's applied.
This connection is correct. You can obviously turn off if you don't want that other port to be used. So let's choose next.
We'll actually just see what is going to happen in this way. It's once, you know if we're going to configure Wi-Fi. Oh I just need to scroll up. So we're going to call this TTG. Spin OAM I'm going to put a password on there.
And I want to show you later on how to optimize this to get the best speed out of it. As well. So here we've got so we've got the controller name is 4G test. This is the name of our site.
We've set up the internet connection how we actually want it to be in this controller is going to manage it. And we're now going to hit finish. So I'm not sure whether this is going to actually be able to adopt the controller, because we did set a password for it.
So it'll be interesting to see, if it actually needs a password to be put in to actually, join that to the network. So the controller is set up. So we obviously gave this a name of TTG. So we just let that log in. Okay. So now at this stage, it's just trying to give us some basic ideas of what we can actually see in the system and how it's all controlled.
And some of that will be learning, but this at least gives you an idea. As I walk through how to actually get everything, set up. So I want to just see if it actually has added in. There's a new controller version, which we can probably update to in a few moments. At the moment the gateway doesn't look like it's adopted, so that will be the first thing that we're going to get done.
We've got our site here, so we can now go into our site, and our site is actually going to show us any devices that have been, seen. And we might not need to actually do an update on the controller before will actually be able to do, other bits and pieces with it. But let's just have a look and see whether I can see that there are any, things in here.
So this hasn't actually adopted, our router, yet. So what I'm actually going to do is we're actually going to, do that firmware update. And once we've done that firmware update, if I can find where it is now because it was under notifications, wasn't it? Let me just see that was under notifications with notifications. Yeah. Let's just come back up to the dashboard. We just need to do that update.
Okay, so we just need to go. I may just show. You need to just go back up to global.
You can just see under there. And that will just prompt you, for the settings in here, to be able to update this. So I'm just going to push this on. There will probably be several other update, on this, as we go along because we're, I think we're, we're time recording. We're about. 515.15.
So let's just run this through. We're just going to let this do a update. Which will just take a few moments.
And then I'll actually, join back, once that's actually done. Okay, so as we can see, it's now downloaded. It's just now applying the update to the controller. So we should be able to go back through in a few moments and actually add in the router.
The more tricky bit of this journey is probably actually adding the router. In my opinion, there are many ways of doing it, but adding the router in that first time, that we actually do this to get everything, neatly running. Once that's in, we're going to change the IP range. So it's going to be something that's not going to be, conflicting with anything or any other broadband connection that you have. That's probably the second trickiest thing to do.
Once we've done that, everything should become a little bit smoother in operation. And from that point forward, we should then, be able to, actually start doing the rest of the config and get everything, ready. That's why it's easier to have a computer now connected to the local side of this device. Because it means that we're not reliant on the internet connection.
Everything else, working, for this, other than obviously doing the update, we did need the internet for that. But past that, we don't really need, the internet for this initial bit of configuration, getting everything running. So it's applied part of the update. But this be fairly normal. It means that the device is gone into a reboot.
And this key here, will no longer be functioning because it's, reset itself. So don't panic if you see A404 error like that. It's just a matter of the fact that it's restarting and it's a unique security key. Will have changed. So just reload.
At that point, the web browser with the original IP address that you have, and that will then allow us to, see this to start up. Now, all of this bit, as you can see, is moderately slow. So do be patient. And it does tell you what's on the front of the screen. It is running a little operating system.
It isn't the fastest in the world, but it doesn't need to be, because it's not your roots or anything. This is actually just controlling, what is happening here. So it's almost at the point where it has now started up and we should be able to log in again. We're then just be able to see whether there are any more updates. And we should now be able to then get the router, all in line, and set up that way round.
So hopefully let's just see, if this is going to work, it's now should hopefully allow us to log in again. All right. So again username and password that we set. All right. It's just waking itself up after that first reload and update. And then we're here.
We are back into our controller. Like I said, it's time of recording this. So it is, February 2025. It has actually updated, the, I guess updated it to the most recent version.
That we have here. And there should be a way to see that in due course. We'll have a little, look here at 5.15 is the, current version. So what we're actually going to do, like we've done before, we can go into the site here, we want to try and see if we can get, gateway adopted and correct now because I went through to get IP address, it wasn't in factory default.
And because it's not in factory default, then, we set a username and password. So we will need to have that username and password to then be able to adopt, the device into the network. If you did it in factory default, then this would probably already be in at this point in time. So,
let's just, see if we can go now to devices. Devices should show us, this as I think pending last time, we actually had a little look or no devices, found at this moment in time, which is interesting, because there are a number of devices actually connected to it. So, little bit interesting there.
Probably because this device has rebooted recently. And as a result, the other devices in here can't be haven't been seen because they haven't tried, to look back or look home yet. Let's just check in global. That in global. It doesn't give us any other options here on this. So that's why I record these videos this way around. Because there isn't a perfect science.
You think that everything is, working fine. And then, you suddenly find that, for some reason, it doesn't show you a bunch of the devices here. So it has seen these. It just doesn't know what actually to do with them.
So all I went up was the global view. So let's just have a little look on here. Action for us. Adopt. Please accept the site. We want to put this into spinner. So I think this will probably for the router.
Provided the gateway is a different model from the gateway model. Configure it. Please go to widening and change your gateway model. Please choose University as gateway when your device is not listed. Okay, so that's because of how we set it in the beginning.
So we're going to do exactly what it says. So we're going to go to Settings and Wired Connections I think it is settings. Settings.
Oh I think we have to do this in spinal. So we change to spin spinal. All right. So we've got, some more controller software, available if we decide to upgrade to that.
So, because this is new, it's probably worthwhile, doing that's going to take a little bit of time, but let's first, go and find our settings so that we know we've got this right. Wired networks, internet, we've got our overrides. Oh, look, here we go. So we have, let's see if we got our 4G model. I'm not totally sure which one we've got.
So let's go and actually have a look in here. Status. Hopefully this might show us in system status, the actual model it is. Let's log back in again.
So it does want it. And that's why the firmware needed to be updated. So we've got a version one here. All right. So we need to just match this up.
Now to be version one okay. And we should now be able to set that correctly, which is all the settings that we wanted. Drag the internet connection.
Drag the current one port to the field to copy its settings into the new port. Okay. So we need to, push this one, in here. And does this one allowed to go in here as well? I think we want those settings to be in there, by the looks of it. It's just because obviously it's changed, the way it is. And hopefully your device, Hopefully your device will be slightly more up to date than mine when you come to do this.
So, now it is all in place. That's actually moved over now in my instance. I don't need why one to. We don't need that to be enabled. But this one should be correct. I'm just going to have a double check of the settings, picking up a dynamic IP address, which is all I actually need it to be able to do to function.
So, I'm not going to update this controller just yet. We'll do all that a little bit later on. All right.
So again, I think if we come in to devices these devices are now showing here. It just took a moment to update. That's okay.
We're going to deal with that one in a minute. Let's just deal with this one. We want to adopt this. So here's the device.
Hopefully we can now choose adopt. This is adding it to our AC controller I know this takes it a little bit. So it set the username and password is incorrect which is what we expected. It to be.
I just need to figure out if there is a way for us to be able to put in the username and password. Here we go. So, the, username we set up in the beginning, it's because it needs to actually log in to this device and now make some changes and work. The box.
So this should now adopt the device. And this will actually bring it into our network. And it's now manageable. So this I guess is the the the slightly more difficult set up with the initial bits that we do with anything like this, any cloud managed solution.
And once we've got this foundation right, then we're all good from that point. Moving forward. So now it's provisioning it from here. So it knows of all the settings that we've got and it's bringing those across. We will in a moment go and change the IP addresses. But we'll do that in a process.
So we're just going to give that a couple more, moments now to an update and finish the provisioning. And now it's gone to connected. All right.
So this device is now part of our Amada controller. And it's actually now managed, by the controller in not itself. So I think if we actually were to try and log in, it tells us this gateway is now managed by our controller and we can no longer manage it directly in that we can make all the setting changes and everything that we want from within, side.
Set up here, which is great. It's a really great and easy way of making this all work and how the networks all done, what the ports are actually doing. And if we want to make any changes to those, ports as well. So this is, how we set up, let's just prove to ourselves, that we can still get to the internet, which we can't, which was interesting because this is where actually, my LAN connection is plugged in. And so no longer can, this, I think, connect to the internet because it's expecting it to be plugged a different way around.
And that is because of the way that we did that, adopting. So let's just see if we can, change how, some of this works. And so we need to come over here to, settings now that this is, provisioned up and go back to our wired networks, which evidently have made a mistake in, and so we've got here our, one and lan one and LAN one. So let's just have a look and see what we've actually got wrong in this, set up. I'm not sure why when to is in here.
Because we've got LTE running, so let's just have a check on our IP config. So if you have this issue we're just going to check out, we've got our IPS. And there we go. So it was taking a moment for the router to come online and update, which panicked me. So I couldn't quite figure out what I'd actually done wrong. So that is set up, exactly how we needed to and is now functioning.
If we come to devices, we can actually see it in here. Connected and working. All right. So if we want to, we can have a look at some of the rest of it. This switch type is inconsistent with the switch type configured for the site.
Don't quite actually know what that means, but I would like to actually bring this switch into the network as well. So let's just, see why it doesn't like the configuration or the way that this is actually, configured up. The switch type is inconsistent with the switch type configured for the site. All right. Well, we might have to come back and have a look and see what we've spotted. On that.
But I want to, just show you the next main bit, which is, how we change the IP address. And therefore get this a move to an IP that won't maybe conflict with your internet service provider. You might not need to do this step.
So do feel free, to run past it. What I do want to do first is I do actually want to look at the way that the device is actually configured. So I'm going to come back to global.
I'm going to join this to our, TP-Link cloud account. This means that I can find out IP address information and other bits and pieces without, actually having to know what's going on on the network because I'm about to change its IP address. It's probably one of the most useful things, that I can actually, do. So cloud access is where we're going to do this. We're going to enable cloud access, and it's going to ask for, our ID, in this instance, in fact. I don't even do that right.
Okay. So that is username. so let me just grab the password here. I'm just going to grab it from, password manager. So this is now connected to this, address here.
So if we head on over, actually to on premise, you'll see in here a number of, devices, we have, for customers where you can see the version status, and then we can actually access the unit directly. We could do this as if we were actually in front of it. And connected. This is useful because in a moment, we're going to change the IP address. And we won't know what it's going to change to.
So we can actually use this to get back into the unit. And anywhere that as long as this has got internet access, this will able to actually then call home. So let's now we've added this, we can actually go and change this IP range. Back to something, that is not going to conflict with any other ISP or router that you might have into your, network. So we can head up into spin on, which is our site, and we wanting to head into wired, networks because we're going to change the local area network, LAN side of things.
So in wired networks, we're going to go to LAN. And here we're going to change it to an IP range. We can see this is our current IP range. We want to change this away. Now the switch that we have connected will change its IP. The gateway will change its IP and the AC control.
And the problem is that, those type of things happen over a period of time. If the network cable is physically not reconnected, it can maybe sit for about eight hours. So we'll get internet access, but these devices won't.
So in a moment we'll actually go and restart those because that will actually be a quicker way of getting them to get a new IP address. So we're going to just choose a subnet that's completely different to anything else that's running on here. So dot 14. And so we need to now change the Dhcp scope. And I like to just make this have a little bit of space in case we have a needed dedicated IPS or static IPS.
So I'm just going to change that to dot ten there. And I'm just going to change this one over here, to dot 50. This is still going to give us as you can see, it doesn't want to do this.
This is still going to give us, 240 usable IP addresses, which is ample. You might need to change this if you think you're going to have more devices on that, you can change, this you could use the update range to do automatically. I've done this manually. Now when we click save this is going to say I'm going to change all of the settings. Are you really really sure.
So I'm going to hit confirm. You could have done this through the controller up here. That we did.
This takes a few more moments for it to be pushed to the device. For this initial stage, I'm just going to do it on from here. So I'm just going to hit confirm. If we were to come back to our command prompt, let's just clear out what we had in here and go back to that one that we had before, which was ping.
We'll actually see that we now actually can't connect to the internet. Why? Because if we look at our IP address, our IP address here is actually still in the zero range where we've changed it to 14. So for a computer it's pretty easy.
We can just do a renew of our IP config by doing this. Renew. We should pick up a new IP address. It does sometimes take a little while to update. But if we now do this, we can actually see we are in a 14 IP range. So if we again ping Google we can see we've now got internet access. The problem we don't know is what IP address the AC controller is on.
And it'll actually probably most likely still be on the old IP address. So we have a few ways of doing it. The easiest way really is just to reboot the AC controller and the switch.
And then that will force those to pick up a new IP address for speed. That's the way that I'm actually going to do that. So let's just head on over, to our set up there and, just show you that, happening. All right. So, as you're aware, the AC controller is powered by our little Poe switch here. So the easiest thing for me is actually just to pull the power out of the back of that device.
And then, give it a moment and plug it back in. What's that actually going to do? It's actually going to reboot. The controller is going to put new power to that. This is always going to connect back to the router again, and request a new IP address as well.
So we can just wait for a moment. We can see, the power light has just come up on the, on our controller, on our switch that is comfortably, booting as well. All right, so let's just walk back to the computer.
We'll take a couple of moments for those, to actually come back. Good. And, finish booting. But over here again, part of our problem is we don't actually know what the IP address is of the AC controller. We won't be able to reload this because this unique key up here links back to the IP address that it used to have. So what are we going to use? We're going to use on premise option in our TP-Link cloud.
We're just going to hit refresh. And we'll find in a moment, that this will probably actually show as offline. So let's just give that a couple more minutes to start. And then we'll come back to this. Okay. So do about three minutes or so.
And we can now see this is online. And we can actually log into this. We can actually find the, IP address directly from here, from the controller of what it is, and then log in to it locally again, which we'll do in a moment. Just to make things a little bit faster.
But this is a sort of a get out of jail free card and a way round of actually making it work. Like I said, you don't have to do this. If you found that anything doesn't, if you find the IP ranges in conflict with anything that you've, got working.
But I just wanted to show you this, as a ultimate way round it now. It's just having a little bit of an issue, by the looks of it. Finishing off, connecting, I think it's not quite booted yet, so we'll just wait for that to, finish there. But while it's doing that, what I just wanted to show you is a quick speed test. Of, the connection, just so you can see as a standard router what sort of speeds you can get through it. So, we run something called, web perf, which is on a ten gig test server.
So let me just, go into that folder. So what this is going to do is it's going to do the speed test with five concurrent streams to our test server. And you can see there we're getting 866 870 megabits a second.
So that is really performing. If you've got a one gig internet connection. This router itself is giving you one gig. We'll try and show you what you can get potentially on wireless, as something the next stage is once we've got this working. But I just wanted to show you what you should be able to assume that you can get from this device as well.
It obviously is a small little router, but. And it only has a one gig internet interface. So we're getting this is actually pretty cool. Hopefully that's a good, useful, show of some speed there.
And we'll do some more. When it comes to wireless shortly. So let's just see if we can get into this device. It's just taking a little while here to do this.
Like I said, I think it's just because it has been finishing, booting. And it's just because I've been patient. Person. Just come back and launch the connection brand new and afresh.
Here we go. That one, I think, probably is going to load, a little bit easier. And then we can use the client view over on the left hand side here once it has loaded to be able to, find the IP address of the controller. And then we'll be able to make some management changes directly in that, as we start to work on the next portions of the set up. So as it just loads like I said, we can get to this. We can go, to, clients on the left hand menu.
We first need to come down to the site that we want to be in. So let's just head to that site on the left hand side. So top, right hand there. And then in a moment, I'll just give us a few extra options down here and we'll see client in a minute. This one here. Clients. And we're looking for our controller in there.
Here's our OC controller, and it's on dot 12. So if we go back up here and change our IP address to 14 dot 12, we should now be able to get into the local controller. Don't worry about that. It doesn't mean it is insecure. It just means it doesn't have a paid for certificate.
So it is still a security. It needs to be. We should now be prompted to actually log in to this device.
Here we go. So let's log in. Okay, so we're now back in. We performed an IP change with probably done all the most difficult portions of this. Now so what we want to really want to start on, other than clicking all of these boxes that are sort of slightly annoying and there are some options there with the firmware upgrade for some of the devices.
We do all probably want to get that, switch set up into the network. We did have some issues before that it wasn't happy because every device that we've added, if it has the word commander in it, when you purchase it, you can manage it here from the same controller. So let's just have a little look. I mean, it did have a red exclamation mark on it before saying it wasn't, in the quite the same, set up or, switch configuration here. So I did notice, I think, when we went into, settings previously and wired networks and the LAN, there was a switch profile option up here. Let's just have a little look.
I'm not sure what it has. So it's got all key devices, settings key. Okay. Switch settings. So everything there looks like it shouldn't be an option issue. I'm just not quite sure.
Why? It's not happy. With that. So I would like to just quickly crack why we can't add that in.
So let's just choose. It does have the the switch does not match the switch type configured for this site. All right. So let's just try and see again what that switch type is and see where we have the issues. So just bear with me two minutes.
But I just find the answer for that. Okay. I'll not actually come up against this issue before where it says the type does not match. And this I found out, is actually related to, options for how you manage, or what devices can be added into your set up. So you want to be in global view and you then want to edit the site.
So if we come up to the dashboard in the global view, we can see our site is here and we can choose edit. What I've not ticked in this instance is allowing us to also have easy managed switches. These don't support all of the functions, but they do what we need them to do. In this instance is just providing poha. So I forgot to actually take that box.
So should be now that if we go back to global or back to our spinner view, we can now actually get that added in, and adopted. And then I'm happy that we can move on from there. So let's just go into devices.
And now it says that it's possible it doesn't have that exclamation mark. Let's just get that adopted and provisioned. So we've now got our device in place.
Our router our switch and our AC controller. And we figured out a few little problems that we had along the way. Most of these are updated most of the way along, but we have some firmware updates we can do in due course. So this is now added, and we can start to move on.
So having got that bit done, we just want to look at wireless and get the best out of it. We saw we could get a gigabit a second, from the Ethernet port. It is slightly different on what we're going to get, straight from the internet. So I'm just going to quickly connect my mobile phone up to the wireless, of this device. And just do a speed test using IPF again. Just for reference, so that we can see, what this actually, does.
So let me just run a speed test in the standard set up. You can see there we're getting about 400. Just under 400, you know, maxing maybe sometimes around about the 500 megabits a second. Now wireless is all driven by the number of channels that you join together if you like. And each frequency has a maximum number that you can join.
And the more that we join, the faster speed we can get. But at the same time, the devices need to be closer, and there's more interference from, other people around on neighbors and things like that as well. So in this instance, what we can do and it's done per device.
We can change the, the channel width. So if I actually now go to our router because we remember we got an extra 3000 mentioned it before, that can do about 600 megabits a second in the wireless. In 2.4. And around, and then probably 2.4 gigabits a second in the five and six gigahertz frequency. Now that's your synchronization speed.
You'll then get roughly half of that speed. So in wireless in 2.5 sorry 2.4. If you sync to 600 Meg you'll get around about 300 mega second. So we're wanting to get ourselves to sync at close to a gig to give us 500 mega second. And depending on the quality of your device, you may be able to connect faster than that.
So we've gone into the device and gone to config. Come down here to radios. And we can now change the channel width.
It's on auto. And probably for most people living on auto is the best if you're trying to get the most out of it. Then you can play with this, depending on which access points you have got, we can only change, this to 2.4 and five. Because wireless, the six gigahertz frequency is not supported on this router. So let's choose five gigahertz. Use the maximum number of channels.
So this is eight channels joined together. And we're going to apply that. Now what I do need to do is I do need to just, disconnect, from the Wi-Fi and rejoin the Wi-Fi, just so that I can tell the device to re synchronize. So let me just do that on here. So let me just do this on here, all right? And let it reconnect.
And then we'll just do another speed test and just see whether we've got a little bit of improvement. As a result of making that, test. Okay. So let's run that test again.
And it does take a few moments, for my device to re synchronize and join the Wi-Fi again. So let's just, give that a moment. And let me, just give that a moment to reset.
Okay, so we've just rejoined the Wi-Fi and took a little bit of messing around to get it rejoined and give you a moment, but you can now see that our speed is above, and it depends on where I put my mobile phone. Exactly. But you did see it spiked up to 694mbps, which is again a good 150 megabits a second faster than we had before we consuming more channels. We are meaning the device has to be closer, but we can see greater speed. So realistically, this device should be sinking at probably, close to a gig so we can have an hour. Look, if we want to see that and go to clients, and clients, you can add some of the missing columns if you want to in here.
And you can see, where my what my DB level is. I'm actually in pretty good here. You can see that I've actually connected at 1.2 gigabits a second.
So as I said to you, you get about half of that as an actual transmission speed. And you can see here of even here connected at 2.4 gigabits, which is the maximum it is. So now some of this speed is down to the wireless of the device that's actually doing it. The wireless in my phone. And all of the quality that is around that. So depending on your distance and the quality, we can see that it is potentially possible to get up to close that gig a second.
I reckon the high 6 or 700 is probably the speed that you're going to generally get. So hopefully that's a start. Now we've done our controller. We've got our router online and we've got our switch connected. We've talked a little bit about Wi-Fi.
I'm just going to quickly go back, and change that back down to auto. For the moment, sorry, I need to do that in devices. Because I just want to make sure that we don't oversaturate what we're doing in the rest of the test. And you can obviously do that per access point if you want to. So if there's some areas you want to get a little bit better performance from, then you could boost that up if you knew there was devices that were generally fairly close.
So now I think what we really want to do is head on over, and talk about the next bit, in this, to actually get, the, wireless access point connected. And then we'll have a look at the features that we've got, on that as well. So let's head on over there. Okay. So, obviously we've got all of our bits and pieces set up as they are.
We want to add in this access point. Now, this access point is actually an X. 1800. So we'll do a slightly less, of the speed that we've maybe got off this router, down here.
But that's okay. We want to just make sure that this actually functions and, works. And so this would be maybe we're going to extend this inside. This is still going to give us 5 or 600mbps.
So what are we going to do. Very easy. This is pony powered single port in. There was a power pack in there. If you wanted to prefer to put this to a mains often just think about on a wireless.
Just come out around this. But it is designed to be ceiling mounted and more. The traffic to come in a sort of dome if you like, underneath that if I put it this way out. So just think about that as you put it in place.
So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to connect a cable, up to this device here and plug it in to one of those spare, Ethernet ports that gives out power in our switch. And that will allow that to power up. And once that's all powered up, we'll be actually able to adopt that in exactly the same way. As we were able to do the switch, and the router or the, yes, the switch and the router. And then we should be able to do a little bit more wireless config with that.
And then we'll maybe look at some of the other options around what we can do with wireless. And then we'll extend it out, to the next building. Just using this bench here. And we'll be able to see how those bits happen as well. So after a couple of minutes, we can see the device has booted.
You can just see it here. It's actually blue. It's faded out with the lights that we've got here, but it's a blue indicator light here to show that this unit is all started up. So now if we head on over to the computer, we should be able to adopt this and get this set up, into the network that we've already created. Okay.
We've done all the heavy lifting really early on in, this stage of this. And so this makes this really quick and easy for us because all the devices, certainly wireless ones that we choose to add now, they will going to pick up all those wireless settings that we've already created. So we can just choose this and choose that. Adopt this is going to add it into the network. It's going to add on, all of those wireless settings. And we're actually going to be ready to go at that point in time.
That's all there is to actually adding another network, access point. These are set in a mesh in this terminology, mesh. I mean, a single network name, an SSD sharing, a being shared across all of the access points that are physically cabled to each other. So if we were actually to, go into this device, we could do this again, the same as I showed you on the router itself.
If we went into radios on this, we could again change the channel bandwidth if we wanted to improve the bandwidth. You see, because this is only in acts 1800 that we can't push the bandwidth up, the channel weight for the 80MHz, whereas on the, a 3000 router up here, we could push that up to 160MHz. My phone will now, or whatever device is being connected to my phone will now, jump between whichever connection it finds more appropriate and is closer. And so that's how this works. So we want to try and get our density right. More of the spread across is going to give a better footprint is going to mean that devices are not as far away as they need should be.
We're not too far away. Sorry. And so as a result, they're all wireless is going to be good for everybody. Because remember, if another device has a lower speed, it is going to help. It's going to actually draw down the speed for everybody else. So by getting enough access points spread around our house or our property, our office or whatever we're doing with set up will allow us to get the best balance that we want from all of this.
So that is the simple stage of adding another wireless access point to this setting. And this set up, it just is adopted in. And all of those settings are that.
Now you may decide if you're going to have multiple access points that you do want to look at. Why an optimization. Because we talked about channels and these can overlap each other.
Optimization is a useful, thing to do. What does this do? This actually makes sure that, all of the devices are not overlapping with their channels. And so as a resul
2025-04-02 05:38
