Howdy,

First things first, a huge thanks to the tp-link tech support crew that answered and responded to all my questions very quickly.

If you're running an AX50 with Advanced Security > Access Control turned on, you may notice something interesting in the help window;

I suspected that this setting was affecting my guest network, which seemed to not allow folks to join unless I added their mac address to the list.

I did some digging in the client code and found that the toggle is not displayed.  After changing the code to display the control, it confirmed that the setting was turned on.  After the edit, I was able to use the "Guest Devices Control" toggle as described in the help text to turn off that feature and get my guest network working without having to add folks manually to my whitelist.

The implementation is not great, but it works.  People can join your guest network, but they won't have internet access for some amount of time, measured in minutes.  When they do get access, it's because the router has added their MAC address to the whitelist in the background.  Any subsequent connection to your guest network by that address will have internet access immediately, unless you go and remove them from the whitelist again.

Based on the initial response from tech support, I suspect that this option is supposed to be disabled always, and then everything works, but on my unit, for some reason, the option was enabled, and I could not get my guest network working until I found this control and turned it off.

Obviously this editing of the client-side code to make the control visible means that it's not fully supported, and they may choose to remove the option entirely in the future; however, if you can't seem to get your guest network working while using a whitelist access control, this may be your hidden problem.

Regards,

M. C.