October 6, 2018

TP-Link AP225 wireless access point (AC1350)

For several years I have been using an ancient WRT54GS as the wireless access point in my house. This unit is working well enough, but is limited to 54 Mb/s since it only supports 802.11 b/g.

I shopped around and decided to get something better than the usual home access point for under $30. I settled on the TP-link AP225. This units supports 802.11 n and ac and offers 450 Mbps on 2.4 Ghz and 867 Mbps on 5 Ghz. It is labeled as a "business solution" and that sort of sold me as I was hoping that might mean it was somehow better than the usual home access point. Note that if you round up the 867 to 900, then add 450, you get a total bandwidth of 1350 and that gives you the AC1350 model number

A key feature is that it is powered via POE.

One of their marketing charts claims it can support 60-80 clients, but no telling exactly what that means. It does something I will never need or utilize, namely if you have a bunch of these, they can cover for each other if one fails via some kind of "mesh network" with redundancy to improve reliability.

These sell for $60 in 2023. Mine has now been running for 5 years and seems to be still going strong.

The sticker on the bottom of my unit says "EAP225 ver 3.0 AC1350".

This thing is also called an AC1350, which is totally confusing given that TP-Link has a wifi/router called an AC1350. What were they thinking? These are entirely different products.

Plug it in and see what happens

I connect it to the POE injector (but not to my network) and power it up. As advertised, it now advertises two SSID: TP_Link_5GHz_aabbcc and another with "2.4GHz". My tablet sees these, but hangs forever trying to get an IP address. My guess is that it is not running a DHCP server.

So I connect it to my network and repower it. My router now shows that it has been given an IP address via DHCP at 192.168.0.39 -- and now my tablet can connect and gets an IP address (presumably via the DHCP running on my router). But now that I know the IP (thanks to my router), I can point a browser from my linux desktop at 192.168.0.39 and indeed it is prompting me for a user password. It ships with admin/admin and indeed that gets me in. I change the user/password to something I like and save it. I also assign a static IP. I also set the SSID for both the 2.4 Ghz and the 5 Ghz side of the unit. I select WPA-PSK security and set a key (WPA-Enterprise is also available). I save these settings, and I am on the air in a basic way. Not need to use my tablet or do any kind of setup via wireless, all that is really needed is DHCP on my local network and an ability to query new DHCP assignments.

Omada management software

Amazingly the "Omada" management software is available for linux!

But I decided this was more than I wanted to get involved with. Besides it is written in Java, and I hate java -- every java GUI that I have used is slow and wretched.

Client mode

I don't ever intend to use the AP225 in client mode, but I am tempted to put a client mode unit near the TV my wife uses and eliminate the fire stick. I considered getting te N300 instead of the AP225, but decided to shell out an extra $50 and get a commercial grade unit. No regrets so far.
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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org