@MeTPForum 

I think these are globally available.

It seems the Devolo units have some clear advatages compared to the P7 units:

- newer PLC standard, also using the ground conductor (should work better crossing phases and circuit breakers)

- at least some tools (Devolo cockpit), allowing debugging/testing/evaluating PLC backbone performance
- power socket pass through with filtering

Unfortunately, I bought the P7 units for my parents house, blindly trusting the PLC backbone feature, a few months ago. I only got around installing them last week, discovering the PLC stuff didn't work as expected, and I'm now too late to return them. If this doesn't get resolved soon, I'll probably still try the Devolo units, and if succesfull, get rid of the P7's.

@Tor-Arne 

Any chance the debug logs can be shared? Very interested...

@Tor-Arne 

Sounds rather interesting. What kind of tests are performed? What knowledge did you gain about the P7's during your session(s)?

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find time in general yet and due to business travel to work with the engineers.

@kmiel Thsi turned into a 4 hour session with at least 2 engineers from 2 locations (TP_link and TP_LINK RD) debugging my 6 Deco P7's. So obviously not easy, and I had to install new debug firmware first, giving HTTP and Telnet access to the OS on the P7's.

I think the 2nd engineer was a escalation after approx 1 hour, as someone that knew the config files started making changes and things started working. This was much helped by using my own continous monitoring of latency between a monitoring server and each Deco.

I can go into much more detail at a later start for those interested - it turned out that my remote Deco's were doing backhaul to a very remote main node, instead of to the closest node) with resulting dropouts and poor performance. While they were connected we saw pingtimes of over 500ms, and a inability to ping a number of my servers, the servers could still ping the remote node, but the remote node could not ping the same servers).

A set of configs were changed, node restarted, and as you can see the node with the red trace started behaving.

And my test involving streaming HD movies in the room with the "misbehaving" node now works.

The changed configs were :

    option scaling_factor ’96’ <—      option scaling_factor ’76’
    option low_rssi_threshold ’35’ <—- option low_rssi_threshold ’14’
    option high_rssi_threshold ’40’ <—— option high_rssi_threshold ’25’

I now know a lot more about the P7's - and I have much more confidence in the HW and operating system than before. We just need access to see (and debug) thes kind of problems, and ways of tuning some fo these variables.

And a great Thank You to the TP-link engineers that helped me.

Tor

@Tor-Arne 

Good to hear the (long) session was useful for you. A plus is that you gained more knowledge on the P7's. Glad TP-Link is offering some decent support, too.

What will this result into? I mean, users with the regular firmware won't be able to tweak the mentioned thresholds/settings. Will they add advanced configuration options or provide a new firmware in which these optimized settings are embedded? Not sure if these settings will apply to all / the majority of environments.

Any further insights on the powerline backhaul? Something this topic is all about :-)

Thanks.

@Tor-Arne 

Well that is great news to hear. Was there any insight into the PLC situation and for those of us less on the tech savvy end were they going to be rolling out an update to the firmware?

 Thanks!

@kmiel 

Ha! Exactly the same two wues

@MeTPForum 

Haha, how's that for timing :-)

@kmiel So far the good news is that the Powerline backhaul actually works for me after the session, I asked directly if we would ever get the capability in the app to see and change this, and they said that they "would put it forward to the product management", and that some of this would make its way into the next app version.

I guess that this means that we have to wait and see. But discussing it in this forum clearly has had a (small) effect where they have seen the problems in a real-life situation for themselves. IMHO this was clearly a bug, and we should continue to chase them for a permanent fix and that to me includes visibility in the app, and a web interface drectly to the AP's (like they have for the Powerline links) to help out advanced users.

Btw. I have seen exactly the same problem in their Powerline links, where they slow down the whole network by pairing with the worng unit, but as I coud see it in the webinterface I just unplugged all powerline units and plugged them back in again in a sequence to make sure they connected to the correct units.

Tor

@Tor-Arne The admin panel is in the current public release. They said they didn't include it in the notes because you can't do anything in there yet.