I, like many people, live in a house that is longer than it is wide. My internet connection to the ISP is in one corner of the house and this makes it problematic for any meaningful signal to reach the opposite corner of the house. My solution was set up a Wifi Access Point closer to the middle of the house at a point that I could easily run ethernet from the main router.

I’ve tried quite a few solutions in the past but have shied away from an extender/repeater due to the halved throughput. I was waiting for the excellently reviewed Ubiquiti NanoHD to drop in price, but then I decided it wasn’t dropping in price quick enough and I had to look for alternatives.

Enter the TP-Link EAP245. Not a lot of reputable sites have had reviews of it, so I decided I should just post to help add to the literature out there. I bought this access point from Amazon Canada for $99+tax which is a bargain compared to any other router or access point. It has MU-MIMO which was very important to me as we are a household with more than 20 devices. In retrospect this was a bit premature as I don’t really have any MU-MIMO clients yet. Maybe with the proliferation of WiFi 6 this might change. But I’m not even sure of the compatibility between AC Wave 2 and WiFi 6. (If any reader knows, please drop me a comment)

TP-Link on the floor my 2 level home

The box came with a POE injector and installation was a cinch. I just have it lying on the floor for now. I used iPerf to run some really quick tests between the R7000P and the AP.

Performance

I had a server running on a Surface Pro 3 that was hardwired to the Netgear R7000p via ethernet showing a 1Gbps link. I used my Pixel 3xl (a 2×2 AC device) to walk around my house until it reported the appropriate signal strength for each of the radios. I then ran iPerf (via the Magic iPerf app) using the following flags ‘-c (ipaddress) -P 20’. I ran a few runs until the scores stabilized and I have reported them above.

One thing to note regarding the results is that I believe the Netgear has greater range than the TP-Link even though the TP-Link uses the range more effectively. Put another way, the Netgear will give a stronger signal further from the access point but will be slightly slower compared the TP-Link at that same signal strength. In real world usage, I believe this comes down to a wash. The two are basically neck and neck.

A note about WiFi ratings of these products. According to my reading of the the excellent material at smallnetbuilder.net, the ratings are meaningless and this kind of is proven out in the rudimentary tests shown above. The 1750 rated access point consistently outperformed the 2300 rated router. Part of the increase according to the manufacturers is on the 2.4ghz band that I don’t care about at all. That band is too busy in my area to be of any use and is too easily affected by the microwave. The other part of the increase is based on a rarely supported 5ghz enhancement that you will never come across. In my testing I never saw link rates higher than 866mbps on the 5ghz band for either access point.

Some issues with the firmware

A few miscellaneous notes and observations. The TP-Link connects much faster than the Netgear.. Not sure if some enhanced handshake process was introduced and is going on. But it is uncanny. Managing the TP-Link EAP is fairly straight forward. I used the web interface first and then switched to the Omada controller just to try it out. There is one oddity I noticed though. If I turned QoS off, the WiFi link rates would plummet and never go above 54mbps. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a firmware bug? I may try contacting TP-Link about this because it is very confusing. This behavior was consistent across 2 firmware versions and across both the web interface and Omada controller.

Conclusion

I am extremely happy with my purchase of the TP-Link EAP 245 v3 access point. Due to my placement of it, it pushes signal into the areas of the house where it was lacking before. And all devices that are able to connect to it get very strong speeds. It is currently sitting on the floor but I am seriously considering wall mounting it vertically closer to the top floor so that the signal becomes even stronger.

If you’re on the fence between spending double for a Ubiquiti Unifi Nano-HD or going with the TP-Link, just know that I have no complaints settling for the TP-Link. I’m still getting 200Mbps a floor away on a 2×2 AC client and around 600Mbps when I’m right on top of the AP. That on top of the quick connect and the ability to potentially manage many more clients than a personal home router has me satisfied. I will update this entry as I use it with more notes.