Star letter
When did something so simple become so hard? To deliver and manage a more considered Wi-Fi system at home, I decided to flatten my TP-Link Archer C5400 and RE450 devices and start again with a cunning plan. The reason for the nuclear option was to finally move my kids’ internet access onto a guest network, keeping all core internet devices on a primary network.
This fundamental redesign had been prompted by a two-year Cold War between myself and my son (now 12), where my efforts to implement a viable parental control strategy were constantly undermined by his ingenuity, including… 1 A spoofed MAC address on the Xbox (thanks very much, Microsoft!)
2 Borrowing the powerline network adapter from my Marantz AV unit
3 Connecting to the internet via the RE450 extender …all of which circumvented the MAC address-based, time-limited profiles on the C5400.
Techniques two and three were resolved with a little creative thinking, but technique one had me stumped, hence the decision to put the kids on a guest network that would disappear between preset times.
Even this was painful: when I tried to manually disable the guest networks, each network has to be turned off individually and, every time a guest network is disabled, the C5400 drops the Wi-Fi connection to my phone for a few minutes. This was odd behaviour as I was logged in using a main network SSID. Still, 15 minutes later, the guest networks were down.
Other issues included the fact that, whilst devices connected to the C5400 received immediate internet access, devices connected to the RE450 could only see other internal devices. This was only resolved when I quit fighting with the kit one evening and left it all to fester overnight; I woke the next morning to find everything just working. As an embedded engineer, my inability to fix this particular issue in a recorded and repeatable manner is driving me nuts.
Just before the system started behaving, I considered dumping it all for a mesh system, but as I now have almost everything set up as I want (the Marantz is still on the powerline unit, as it can’t cope with cloned SSIDs on the C5400 and RE450), I plan to leave well alone for at least another year or two… unless you recommend a mesh solution that’s simply too tempting to pass up! David Evans