Question How to set up devices for external office ?

[greengiant89]

Hi,

i am trying to set up a wireless connection to an outdoor office. can somebody confirm my thoughts on how to set up the device and or tell me how it should be set up. i want the office wifi to be on same SSID to make things simpler. the equipment i have is basic home router inside house connected via cable to TP-Link CPE210. i want this to send signal to same model at the office which is connected to a TP-Link TL-WA901ND via cable.

My first thought is i need the 210's to be set to function as bridge. When i do this in the manual it says to create an SSID for the 210's. would using the home SSID not work? or does it need to be its own private one?

Then i want the TL-WA901ND to use the same SSID as the house network so i can move relatively seamlessly between the locations. does this need to be set up as AP mode, Range extender mode or bridge with AP mode? i think it is range extender mode as i want it to use main house SSID but im not exactly sure.

 

[bill001g]

I would set the SSID for the point to point link to a different SSID just to avoid confusion.

The device you have in the remote building you want to run as a simple AP.

You can set the SSID the same for the AP and the main router and it should switch. Wifi is not really designed for roaming. The end device not the network is responsible for doing this and they are pretty stupid. In your case it should work fine since your signals do not overlap..ie signal from the main house can not be used directly without the fancy setup you are using. This means as you walk between the locations the signal will drop and it will switch to the stronger signal. You could make it work with different SSID. People for example put in both their home and work SSID and even though the networks are completely different it will switch.......well most/some of the time. It all depends on how the end device software is designed which varies quite a bit.

Other than being a bit slow what you propose should work fine. They make newer models of point to point bridge units that can run faster and on the 5g radio channels.

 

[greengiant89]

I would set the SSID for the point to point link to a different SSID just to avoid confusion.

The device you have in the remote building you want to run as a simple AP.

You can set the SSID the same for the AP and the main router and it should switch. Wifi is not really designed for roaming. The end device not the network is responsible for doing this and they are pretty stupid. In your case it should work fine since your signals do not overlap..ie signal from the main house can not be used directly without the fancy setup you are using. This means as you walk between the locations the signal will drop and it will switch to the stronger signal. You could make it work with different SSID. People for example put in both their home and work SSID and even though the networks are completely different it will switch.......well most/some of the time. It all depends on how the end device software is designed which varies quite a bit.

Other than being a bit slow what you propose should work fine. They make newer models of point to point bridge units that can run faster and on the 5g radio channels.

thanks.

i presume i should be able to set the point to point bridge so they don't broadcast as i only want them to be a wireless connection between the 2 locations. would there be any config i need to do for the end point AP (TL-WA901ND) so that it is able to send and retrieve data over the bridge that is on the different SSID for example getting IP addresses from the main house router.

 

[bill001g]

Point to point bridge tend to vary a bit how you set them up. Some you can connect without a SSID at all. In general it doesn't matter a lot the beam between the units tends to be fairly narrow so even if you were to broadcast a SSID you would have to be in the beam to even see it. That said don't put a dumb password on your point to point link.

The AP thinks it is connected to the router via a ethernet cable. It does not know there is a wireless bridge in the path. The only concern would be to set a proper IP on the AP so you can log into it. Pretty much if your router is say 192.168.1.1 set the AP to something like 192.168.1.200. In general it is highly unlikely you will log into the AP after you set it up.

The concept of SSID and IP addresses are completely separate. The SSID including the wifi encryption etc is only used between the end device and your AP. The SSID is not passed to any other device on your network. From your main routers perspective it thinks that any device in the remote building is connected via the common ethernet cable. It can not tell that you have passed though 2 bridge units and a AP.

You can think of it is as all the different trucks and airplanes your package from amazon passes through. All that matters is the address on the outside of the box. When you get the box there is no way for you to tell how it really got to you.

 

[greengiant89]

ah that makes sense thanks for the help