Lately, it is become more clear that updating my wireless access point was just no longer an option and not performing the way I needed it to perform. Simply stated, I was constantly getting disconnects from various devices and although not “mission critical”, it was just a source of annoyance. It is apparent that I needed to update my home wireless network access point.
Almost daily, while leaving my house, I would need to restart my cell phone in order to set my Ring Alarm. Our Dishwasher would also get routinely dropped from the network and my wife would need to reconfigure the wireless of the dishwasher to get everything synchronized again. Perhaps, most importantly, my Recteg Smoker would become disconnected during an overnight brisket cook.
Out with the old
My old access point was a Tp-link Archer C1900 and it worked for a long time. I don’t recall exactly when I bought it, however the old wireless did many years during a time when the number of devices and the demand quickly outstripped its capability.
This router was with me during the Covid pandemic and I think part of the reason it lasted for so long is that I configured it as an access point only, so the high bandwidth traffic from my servers just never hit this little device. During this time, my family started adding more and more wireless devices. The number of cell phones increase by 33%, and of coarse the streaming services of various Roku devices, DirectTV devices, newer televisions and streaming services all increased the number of connections and the utilization.
Bottom line, it was time…
In with the new
When I hunt for hardware for my home network and homelab, I always try to balance an increase in capability against price. I wanted to find the balance between cost and long life and performance. The answer to this question depends on your values. So after some shopping I opted to purchase a TP-Link Tri-Band BE9300 WiFi 7 Router Archer BE550 from Amazon.
The BE9300 WiFi 7 Router supports up to 9 Gbps of network backbone traffic and connects to the network switch with 2.5 GB ports. It might be time to update my main switch…. haha.
First and foremost is the a modern Generation 7 wireless mesh router. If I determine that I have a weak signal in or around my home, I would be able to pick up an extender. It also features support for 2.5 Ghz, 5 Ghz and 6 Ghz wireless connections. Just as important, if offers dedicated SSID’s for IOT devices. In my case, I simply reconfigured the router so the all of the devices would connect to the 5G IOT network. The cell phones, laptops and and streaming devices are reconfigure to utilize and separate channel to isolate the streaming traffic from the relatively low demand devices.
Currently, we have no need to offer guest networks, however this router supports this as well.
There are a few things which I am not happy about with this router. They are not deal breakers, but it would have been nice if TP-Link supported the feature.
The router does not appear to support SNMP. My servers all monitor and graph performance of all the various devices on network. I would love to be able to monitor this router, however, it does not appear to support SNMP or, perhaps I have not found the configuration just yet.
The other issue I have, is that I would prefer if the various wireless channels could be configured with different IP subnets. Essentially, all of the channels pull a DHCP IP address from a single subnet. I would prefer the IOT network offer its own subnet to logically isolate these devices from other wireless clients.
Finally, the web interface is not great. It is not bad, but it is not great. I tend to statically assign IP addresses to some devices and would love the ability to label a device with a common name or DNS name as opposed to the name provided by the manufacturer.
More work to do
In order to improve my network, I utilize updating my access point as a good excuse to reorganize by private network, subnet the network the wireless network to its own IP pool and restructure my internal DNS. Additionally, I am adding a .local domain internally to more easily identify the IOT devices, compared to various servers.
Yes, we finally did reconnect our dishwasher to the new access point. So far, so good.
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