When I bought a couple of these several years ago, PoE was one of the features that made me think the choice was pretty future-proof.
A few days ago I finally got a 802.3af compliant switch and thought I was going to make use of this nice feature, mostly just to get rid of the unnecessary, ugly power bricks. But it did of course not work...
My googling have revealed a bit of confusion about the PoE support. The fact that Asus never mentioned it in any documentation except on some feature listings on the web, does not really help. So my first question was whether it was just a marketing error. I opened one of the access point to look closer at it. And as far as I can tell, there really is an extra voltage regulator there, connected to the ethernet port (the traces are in a mid layer of the board, so you need to look through it against a light source). There are also a couple of "big" MOSFET switches, one in the main regulator area and one in the additional regulator area, which I assume are supposed to switch power source depending on availability.
I them looked at the switch, and noticed that the "Invalid Signature Counter" increased while the AP was connected:
srw2008a# show power inline interface g8
Port Powered Device State Status Priority Class
------- -------------------- -------- ------------ -------- ---------
g8 Auto Searching low class0
Overload Counter: 0
Short Counter: 0
Denied Counter: 0
Absent Counter: 0
Invalid Signature Counter: 15So now I wonder: Is this just a question of the PoE support being prestandard? If so, is there something I can do to fix the problem? Has anyone gotten a WL-300g to work with a standard 802.3af switch?
Bjørn