Mesh networks can use hand off protocols and technology to maintain the seamless connection. I work on an office network utilising FortiNet hardware. Each access point is on it's own channel to avoid interference with themselves and it works PERFECTLY!!! 

Whilst the argument of self healing and self setup is valid, it is also not a ridiculous expectation to want to manually configure things like the channel if the administrator wishes too. If they are looking for this setting... they know at least roughly what they are doing, stopping this is actually not great at all. 

  @David-TP 

I do underswtand all of your explanation as to why we do not get an opportunity to select a wifi-channel ourselves. However: Every time I experience a power outage, for whatever reason, I have a massive challenge to force my Deco's to use the channel I prefer. My nest thermostat uses the Thread protocol to communicate with its heat link and my Zigbee setup throughout my house uses, just like Thread, the 2.4 GHz band. They only communicate in short, low-power pulses, which leaves the Deco system it can use the channels it senses as free but rendering my complete house automation unserviceable. I have to use multiple aother wifi transmitters, old ones I do not want to use anymore like Apple airport expresses, to force my Deco's in a channel I have chosen using a 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer. Why is it not possible to give advanced users the possibility to choose their own channel for 2.4 GHz? This is a massive headache for me everytime my power goes down...

Regards,

Peter

  @PadanFain 

And how much does your office pay for that Fortinet gear? Any clue?

The answer is a little bit more than $400.

I think the only thing more annoying than learning the hard way that channel management is non trivial in mesh wireless networking is having to read through 30 pages of people using weird tautological examples to explain why the tp link engineers should be ashamed.

Here's the thing, rf emitting devices are strictly regulated in North America and abroad. Don't believe me? Go sit and read through your regions regulations surrounding both industrial and residential radio and how they coexist. They are bound to a subset of channels, each corresponding to a set of frequencies within a given bandwidth so that nodes can better spread themselves out within the channel according to whatever algorithm is used. They are only allowed to transmit with so much power before they enter a completely different licensing scheme.

If you have a degree in CS I'm proud of you, but it's not as simple as shouting "greedy algorithm" and then calling it a day. If you go into your devices logs you'll get a better taste of how much each node is doing in the background to gauge how to transmit according to the various IETF RFCs, all the while maintaining replicated sets of metadata to achieve consensus and redundancy within the mesh network. These aren't your little dlink/linksys routers, and if you mistakenly bought into consumer grade mesh networks like I did, then I don't know what to say. We made a poor choice.

I'm frustrated too, but leave the engineers alone. They're stuck in an untenable position and have stopped replying due to all the posts with "evidence" showing a complete misunderstanding of what the data in question shows. You'll be lucky if you get those cute congestion graphs next time. I'd just disable them if I were TP link honestly, all they really do is show the channels center frequency and what it estimates to be it's level of interference. This estimate will vary by company, device hardware revision, even time itself.

TP-link: these devices are very expensive, and I think one thing to take away from this is that you need to do a better job of educating the public on what they can expect with these devices and what they can't. I understand now why it's non trivial to just allow manual adjustment, but these types of issues should be communicated proper so the consumer doesn't get stuck with a $400 lemon if they live in an area with a high amount of interference.

Tp-link engineers: I hope you're all doing well. I thought it was very kind of you to provide custom builds to those who really needed it. That's not something even I would have done. I wish you all the best in your careers! Sorry for the noise (hah).

- NYQUISTS_ANGRY_GHOST

  @Chipower 

I'm an electrical engineer and used to work in firmware and embedded systems. I think I've had enough of school for the time being. Perhaps you should go back to school and learn how a channel is less a single frequency and more so a set of them that are spaced out far enough from eachother so as to avoid interference from separate systems on different bandwidths.  It's called OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiple access).

The little normal curve you see centered on the channel number is not actually representative of the actual power spectral density. Your little mesh node is not a spectrum analyzer. So stop pointing at these diagrams as evidence of anything. They exist to convey to consumers the center frequency and bandwidth, if that.

This info keeps getting repeated by you people, but you just revert back to comparing it to completely different technologies. Repeating the same thing louder each time doesn't make you any more correct. This thread overtime has just became a dumping ground to attack TP-Link employees and make demands that may not be easy to do, if possible given regulations in some regions. It's served it's purpose, moderators have reported this to the engineers numerous times. It's time for mods to lock it.

Oh, and I did study networking. These days I mostly work on the backends of massive colocated distributed systems spanning North America. Well, I did, until the tech industry was set on fire. Now I get to spend my free time arguing with you. How great the world is these days. Maybe TP-link should hire me part time to be the one to come into these forums and say "No" on behalf of the engineering team. I could use a bit of extra income while I job search.

- NYQUISTS_ANGRY_GHOST

  @David-TP 

That's BS. I understand it's designed to be a consumer product that grandma can purchase and setup without issue and for that it mostly works. 

However,  not having any advanced settings such as, channel width, channel number, and power is a disservice to your customers. Anyone with a simple wifi scanner app can see what channels are occupied, and at what strength and select the appropriate channel and channel width. Saying you can't because of fcc compliance in the US is not an excuse, you'd use less words if you just said if you want these features, buy ubiquiti. 

I'm here because I wanted to change the channel width on 2.4 to 20Mhz and you can't.  I also can't make a seperate wifi that's 5ghz only. I can live without power adjustments,  everyone just blasts their radios at full anyway.

When you're taking about congestion, and busy, and you list all these things that use 2.4Ghz, why does the deco pick the widest channel width possible on 2.4 and dramatically increase the chances of interference doing so? Even the ISP boxes default to 20mhz wide channels now. 

I would've liked to been able to switch from 36, to 161, and set 2.4 to 20mhz and moved it to channel 11. That way I wouldn't be stepping on my neighbors and we would both have better wifi networks.

I understand it's a consumer product,  again. However you've pretty said your customers are too stupid to configure their own radios. 

David-TP wrote

Hello all, 

We have already noted all of your requests about choosing the wireless channels manually on the Deco system and they have been forwarded to the developers.

 

I will try to explain why we don't give the Deco administrator the permission to manually choose a channel on the current Deco system, which may not precise but I will try my best:

 

Firstly, we need to clarify that the wireless channels on the current Deco firmware are not manually configurable as Deco automatically selects a 2.4GHz channel to use based on what it sees around it, selecting the channel that has the least interference. The 5GHz channel appears to be configured based on the region the device was manufactured for use in and they are apparently not auto-selected and are definitely not manually configurable.

 

Secondly, we need to reiterate what is the point of having a whole mesh Wi-Fi system in your network. The whole point of mesh networks is to give a seamless, unfettered, and performant experience for wireless networking, and thus a mesh network is "self-configuring" and "self-healing", the network automatically incorporates a new node into the existing structure without needing any adjustments manually by a network administrator and it automatically finds the fastest and most reliable paths to send data. If you change the wireless channel on the Deco nodes manually, it may give you the risk of losing the other Deco nodes and thus ruin your Deco system, you may need to start over again to reconfigure them.

 

What's more, it is not always easy to choose a clear wireless channel in your networks, you may need to test with all of them in order to find one that may be usable. Most importantly, crowded isn’t the same as busy, even though some channel scanning apps tell you one specific channel is busy, they don’t always measure other sources of congestion and interference. Non-Wi-Fi signals (like those from microwaves, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, garage door openers, baby monitors, etc.) can all congest a channel but may not show up in a scan. So it’s possible that a channel can appear empty, while it is, in fact, saturated with other kinds of interference. 

 

Last but not least, other mesh systems such as Google Wi-Fi mesh (update here that Netgear Orbi is not the same mesh as Deco, Orbi is more like a router + an RE, so if we misunderstood it previously, we are sorry for that), don't allow users to change the channel manually either, which means when developing a mesh system, our developers have already taken all factors into serious consideration and choose the current one, the current Deco mesh system may not be perfect or even good, but we don't think it's just that awful or nonusable as some of you thought. If we need or we must do this change to allow you to change the channel, it will require a lot of research in the market and it is not that easy just like you said "just open the option", I think most users like you guys should understand it.

 

Hopefully, that answers your question but let us know if you need more details.

  @David-TP 

Thanks for explaining again David. I also tried myself earlier. I think that at this point, this thread has served its purpose and might be better off locked. There's been several attempts to explain to people the challenges involved. I think at this rate it's just a google search result driving folks here and posting without reading previous responses.

Wishing you and the engineering team all the best!

- NYQUISTS_ANGRY_GHOST

  @NYQUISTS_ANGRY_ 

It actually has not served its purpose.

This is something that still needs to be fixed. The responses from David  at complete BS. He says it can't be done but it can. Other systems can do it so there is no reason why TP Link cannot.

David goes on to spin BS about the breaking of the mesh system and a complete setup will be required if the channel is changed. As I said, this is total BS. If this system is so called , self healing and picks the best channel automatically the it can be changed manually.  

It's no different from doing an optimisation. If you can carry out and optimisation amd it selects the best channel then again, changing it manually would be possible. Using the Deco app would push the channel change out to every unit at the same time or into cache from unit to unit then once sent, the change is implemented and all unit would connect together on the new channel.

It wod not be had for the devs but they they simply don't want to support this product nor provide their customers with a solution. 

This thread should stay open until this is done but hey, I'm not holding my breath. I'm just waiting until I can afford a better system then with take a sledge hammer to all 3 units.

  @NYQUISTS_ANGRY_ 

Whatever has been said, by everyone may or may not be true, but is not necessarily relevant for me.

As a consumer, I want to have a certain degree of control. When I suspect that Deco isn't performing optimal based on my assumptions/information/whatever, I would very much like to be able to make some changes.  When I feel there is no improvement, I can fall back to the default set by Deco.

But I could make changes if I wanted to and that is simply not possible and not advertised you find out after you bought it.

Now don't get me wrong, I am pretty happy with it but I honestly think It could run smoother in my specific case. 

To me it is very odd, that making small adjustments is just not an option, off course I can see David's arguments and understand limitations as such but there is a big gap between, nothing and be able to change every single little thing about a WiFi.

Just my 2 cents, I don't expect any changes for the current appliances, but I sure hope that TP Link takes this into consideration for future development.

What may or not be true? This is engineering, not business or whatever you're thinking of.

Again none of you have attempted to understand and research the situation. You just want to be mad. You just want to be mad because you purchased an expensive mesh setup without understanding the inherent nuances of such a system. Davids last response was on point, and I think given people keep repeating the exact same things that have already been addressed, this is nothing more than a public flogging thread.

Just lock it. This thread is years old and pointless.

- NYQUISTS_ANGRY_GHOST

@Subliminal 

You have no clue what you're talking about. Explain to me with proper citations why what David said is BS. Even a relevant RFC would do.