To start, I am a network engineer with many years of experience in the high-tech industry. I’ve managed many enterprise wireless solutions (meraki, xirrus, ruckus, ubiquiti, Cisco).
I started buying 2 of these EAP245’s and added a 3rd because I was so happy with the value of this unit. 3 of these units handles 40 clients (about 30 home automation devices) and 10 newer laptops/iPhones. I have gigabit internet and this install is in a 2700 sq. Ft home.
Previously, I was running 2x TM-AC1900 (had terrible dark spots in the house, frequently had to disconnect and reconnect to connect to different AP’s)
Pros:
- Form factor — no big antennas poking off, Easily mounts to wall or ceiling.
- Speed and Signal — excellent speed and signal. See screenshot.
- Omada — once it’s setup, the controller software is really quite excellent. I would not run these in an enterprise but for a small business or an insanely powerful home solution, this is a great solution. Adding new AP’s is incredibly simple. Configuration is simple and the analytics/reporting is actually fairly impressive.
- Advanced features — a large reason I chose this unit is the 802.1r functionality. This allows seamless roaming. No disconnection when walking through the house, great for WiFi calls. The Omada controller gives you great visibility into channel utilization.
Cons:
- Limited advances features — Frankly, for what I need to do in the house, the current feature set works perfectly. The only feature I wish the controller had is an “auto signal adjustment” feature.
- Potentially misleading marketing — this is probably my own dumb fault but I did not realize that having the controller on the LAN was required to have centralized management. I mistakenly assumed the “cloud controller” was a phone-home / cloud-based solution provided by TP-Link. You must run the controller (either the OC200 device or the Omada controller). The “cloud controller” is simply the ability to access your controller remotely when you are outside of the network.
Notes:
- I battled setting up Omada for a few hours (again, I am a very technically inclined person). I’m running the Omada software in Docker on a Centos7 server. I can’t fault TP-Link for this as “firewalld” was preventing the Java app from correctly listening on my servers network interface.
Takeaway:
Overall, the EAP-245 is an amazing little access point. The low price point of the AP and quality of the business grade controller makes this a very robust home WiFi solution.
| Wireless Type | 802.11n, 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11ac |
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