EAP610-Outdoor: Mesh in harsh environment
I have a cottage and a boathouse, which is located in rough terrain. I aim to have wifi coverage at the boathouse for safety reasons, as the conventional mobile network does not have coverage.
My cottage will get internet over fiber with 100 Mbps down/100 up at the end of 2023. I plan to use the following hw:
Router ER605 (with 4g backup mobile internet)
OC200 controller
AP1: EAP653 indoor wifi accesspoint (AP), cat6 cable to the router, POE from 230V power
AP2: EAP610 outdoor wifi AP on a pole at the roof top 25m above sea level, cat6 cable to the router - POE from 230V power
AP3: EAP610 outdoor wifi AP located on a pole (5m above sea level); 160m in direct view over sea from AP2 - POE from 230V power
AP4: EAP610 outdoor wifi AP located on a pole (9m above sea level); 140m in direct view over sea from AP3 - POE from 12V battery
There will be several VLANs on the wifi (Camera & public ++)
Q1: I plan to set this up as a MESH network; will AP3 and AP4 work as part of the mesh network despite not beeing wired by cable directly to the router?
Q2: Will this setup be able to deliver reasonable speed (above 15 Mbps) and stability ?
Q3: The location is the west coast of Norway, which have harsh weather during winter with rain/snow and regularly winds above 25-30 m/s [Beaufort 10/11/12]) & sub-zero deg. C. Will EAP610 stand up to this mounted on a metal pole ?
Q4: Is the antennas in the EAP610 Outdoor designed to work if the unit is placed alongside the pole, or must the unit be installed the top end of the pole ?
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Thanks again Doug for your help, it's very useful.
A couple more questions if you don't mind :-)
I figured reducing transmit power so as not to overlap or encroach on other AP's in the same mesh is one way.
--reducing power for wireless meshed nodes can cause more trouble, its better to address with smart frequency planning
ok, leave power, be smart with freq. What about phycical locations, is there a rule of thumb for EAP650's? e.g. 150m max so as to keep within both bands range even though they said to cover 300m?
Do I also need to lock mesh AP's to the specific Root?
--the controller allows you to set a preferred root AP, I definitely recommend this approach. I show one below with the 'gold star' via Action
ok, found that and got the hang of it.
I'm confused about the freq blue/red suggestion? How does the root set two channels/freq to serve each side at once?
--blue/red is only possible with two root APs at the same point, each with a different mesh freq configured.
Ah, that's very interesting - sounds expensive! (2 APs in one place).
The Controller is quite a beast to get my head around, think my brain is about to explode!
--you'll know how 'interesting' it will get once you start to see the mesh self organize...hope you don't wind up with 6 APs on one root and 1 on the other :)
Something to look forward to then ;-)
"self organise" - is that a feature/setting (Auto optimise?) that needs to be turned off?
or is it making sure NOT to leave radio settings on Auto, i.e. manually choose the desired settings for Band, Bandwidth, Channel, Tx Power?
Something else I've not seen yet?
Looking forward to your reply.
Was out doing some testing of our 2xCPE710's in the field earlier, and was impressed with the speed we were getting. Internal local network (using OpenSpeedtestServer) was showing the radio comms between the two was running at about 500-650mbps over 500m and just roughly aligned by eye.
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Gentlemen,
regarding channel selection and AI:
Tested the AI Optimization last night. Had one go, and the channels on 2.4 GHz moved with a ok result. However, the 5GHz radio stopped working for all 3 networks. So I tried it again, with same result. Ended up in going into the app. controller's "Wireless network" and switching of all 5 GHz networks, exiting the application, starting up again and enabling the radios again. And I have signal on the 5GHz band again. Actually very happy with the frequency selection on 5GHz this time - but we are only talking about 6-8 networks competing for air-space. I do not use 6GHz.
The Sheduled channel optimisation tool is "temporary removed" based on the text in web-tool.
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Thanks for the info about the AI optimization.
Is that the Settings->Wireless Networks->WLAN Optimization tool you used?
I find some of the instructions/explanation in the controller interface not very well explained!
I think its probably due to a poor language translation by the technical authors, as unfortunately I frequently find poor clarity in the documentation.
"Notice: Sorry, this function is temporarily offline. It will return online after further optimization. Please pay attention to subsequent version updates. Optimization schedule settings (if any) will be lost. You can initiate WLAN Optimization manually."
This message is unclear.
It could imply that there is a problem with an optimization service/server at the TP-Link end?
Or that there is an issue requiring a fix (version updates) by TP-Link plus a firmware upgrade for the Controller?
Or is it only the scheduling that doesn't work?
Or that you simply need to run manually one time now, in order for it to be able to perform future optimizations as scheduled automatically after the first one has been done?
Personally I think "Deploy Now" is the wrong phrase, I would have used "Run Now".
Previously I didn't try this because the message made me think there was no point as it wouldn't run if I clicked Deploy Now (plus I don't yet have a significant number of access points permanently on the system).
Anyway I just gave it a go now out of interest and it has recommended and changed some settings on the routers wifi.
Couple of screenshots for other users interest.....
And in the History tab....
Thank you Erik.
Jim
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