I've been a fan of TP-Link for years.  I always felt that their products were well made and easy to use and stood up to a lot of use.

Until I bought 5 Deco M9 Plus units (3 for our guest house, 2 for the main house).  I feel like these units are a pain to keep going.  If everything is working fine, they are great to deal with.  But if something goes wrong, it's a nightmare.  I'll leave out my frustrations with the UI in the app, other than to mention that it needs work.

My issue is that I have two M9s on my house LAN.  The Conservatory and the Library.  The Conservatory is the main one.  We live out in the boonies and have a generator for use when we lose power.  The generator powers the 1st floor but not the 2nd.  The Library M9 is on thee 2nd floor.

When power goes out, the generator can take 30-45 seconds to kick in and bring power back up.  Within 2 minutes after that, my media server is back up, my firewall/dnc/router is up.  Basically everything but my workstation upstairs is up and running.

Except the Deco M9 Plus wifi.

It took me a while to track this down, but I found that if my Library unit is offline due to no power, the Conservatory unit (which is the main one) will not work at all.  I get that I have a mesh network setup so I don't have issues with having to worry about which unit my iPad or Switch is connected to and a mesh network works across units.

But, seriously, has TP-Link been so sloppy on this that the main unit can't work on its own?  Every time we have a power outage and I need wifi, I have to go upstairs, where the 2nd unit is set up because that's where it's needed, reach behind stuff that hides the M9, disconnect it, and bring it downstairs and plug it in and hook it up so our wifi works again.

Really?

The Main Controller can't work by itself?

Dealing with power going off for us is frustrating enough, but having to deal with this every time it happens?  I'm a retired programmer, ran my own business based on my own software for years, and I do not get the logic in this.

Is there a workaround?  Is there some way the Deco system can just keep running without both nodes working?  If not, why would it be designed without some kind of failover to kick in so the Main says, "Oh, I'm alone now, I'll work as a stand alone unit?"