Hi Deco community,

I've had Deco Mesh at home for 5+ years and have been super happy with it till now. I love the user interface of the app, the ease in which it can all be setup from scratch, and the way I can remote monitor my home network when away.

I just upgraded my ISP connection to a 2.5/2.5Gbps FTTH and was looking for a router that could connect to the ONT at 2.5gbps and to my LAN at 2.5Gbps (so I need minimum of 2x 2.5gbps Ethernet ports). Most devices around the home are Wifi 6/6e . The home is 400mq over 3 floors with ethernet (1 x Cat6e) to each floor. Wi-Fi between floors/rooms is not good, hence the need for more or less one device per room. We are luck that the house is detached and there are no other networks creating congestion.

My intention was to have a hub and spoke design with a BE25 on each floor (ONT is in the basement where I have a 2.5gbps TP-Link Switch connected to the BE25 Master). On floors 2 and 3 I would have the BE25 backhauled over ethernet to the switch which connects all 3 LAN ports of the BE25s.

Over the weekend I brought my 3x BE25s and 3x M5 and 3x M4 to a single location in the basement where I did a FW update and then factory reset everything and created the new network from scratch.

My issue is that no matter what I try (different ports/cables etc.) there is no way I can get past the first step, which is to have the BE25s communicate over ethernet backhaul through the TP-Link TL-SG105 switch.

BE25 (Master) has port 0 (left) to the ONT at negotiated 2.5gbps and port 1 (right) connected to the Switch

BE25 Slave 1) - first added to the network wirelessly - then has port 0 connected to the same switch as master

BE25 Slave 2) - first added to the network wirelessly - then has port 0 connected to the same switch as master

In this extremely simple example - there is NO WAY, that I can get the two slaves to show Ethernet backhaul. Due to the concrete floors and distance, it’s a must that the 2 slave devices communicate with the master over 2.5gbps ethernet.

According to this : General questions about Ethernet Backhaul feature on your Deco | TP-Link Italia  - It should be possible.

As an experiment (to see if it was a problem with the switch filtering), I added the M5s to the network (first wirelessly) and then connected them to the same switch and hey presto , all three happily connect over ethernet backhaul. Did the same for the M4s and no problem. It's these BE25s that seem not to be able to work in this way. Interesting point that the LEDs for the ports on the switch indicate  the connection is up and running at 2.5gbps (for the BE25) and 1.0gbps (for the M4/M5).

I had a comment from a friend on another forum suggesting that these devices are limited to being daisy-chained (sounds very strange) but I tried that and still no joy - whatever combination of ports/cables (btw all cat6e) they won't both (slave 1/2) show as ethernet backhauled.

If I was having interoperability issues between the BEx and Mx , I could understand maybe (different chipset, origins), but in this kindergarten exercise with the three devices in a brandnew network refusing to create the simplest of hub/spoke networks with just 0.5m of Cat7 cable between them and the switch baffles me completely.

So I looked to changing to another range (avoiding BE completely) yet the XE75 only offers ONE 2.5gbps port - which also baffles me to understand the use case of when that would suffice (in a FTTH using PPPOE to the ONT) unless you were happy to throttle your backhaul connections to 1gbps. There's no better models out there that offer more than 1 multi gigabit port - so am I stuck - do I have to abort this project with TP Link Deco and start again with another brand? This would be such a shame.

Can anyone suggest a model of Deco that supports PPPOE @ 2.5gbps for WAN and has at least 1 extra 2.5gbs port for LAN traffic – AND – is able to backhaul to a switch (which in theory the BE25 should be able to do).

Thanks in advice for any advice.

Cheers, Kevin