Folks
I have a few openwrt devices which have been dumbed down to an access point (no dhcp, no firewall) and their configuration includes roaming. This is a residential application at my home where I have Cat7 running in crawl space.
I am now wondering if these SSID were turned into mesh then would they develop a second path to the Ethernet wired and are there any pro-cons to this approach?
Much appreciate any pointers.
Anil Garg
What would you want to achieve?
In normal circumstances you cannot do better than a cabled link.
Mesh is great when cable is difficult or too expensive, at the expense of some bandwidth and latency.
If you mesh your APs at the same time as cable then you will get bridging loops and no advantage and possibly a broken network. Sure there are things you can do to mitigate the problems but usually there is little if any point in introducing mesh on top of cable.
I have created two subnets. One for the LAN & filer. Second for IOT and guests. The firewall rules are same except that LAN has access to IOT and guest device IPs but not the other way around.
The way, I have done this is by tagging and using consumer grade 8 port smart switches. Then bridge the lan-wifi to lan interface and iot-wifi to iot interface.
I was thinking that all the iot and guests can be put on the 2.4 on 802.11s and then the physical ports will not need to be tagged.
There is some instability in my current network but I have not paid too much investigative into it. In my mind by using cables for lan, I was simplifying a little.
What are your thoughts?
It all depends on what speed you need for each subnet.
In an average home environment very often a 100Mb/s ethernet is way more than necessary for typical family Internet.
Also why a guest network? Is it a guest house with paying guests or just friends coming round occasionally?
What about ethernet splitters and dedicated iot/guest APs? A very cheap and reliable solution....
Most times, its just internet and for that even 100m is overkill. We have some old videos, on a filer in garage, that we would put in our tablets when we travel. I created IOT network just so I can potentially control its capacity to send data out and then added guests to it so that the filer (which has no security as the home has only two of us) is not visible to guests..
You've given me some food for thoughts and I may simplify it.