Home Network Upgrade - TP Link Omada Setup

so you need a network upgrade that's probably why you click this video either that or you're just a huge fan of the channel and for that thank you now personally i already have what i would consider a advanced home user network setup but a lot of people don't have that which is why i'm actually at my buddy's place he's in dire need of a network upgrade he has literally the most basic network setup you can have it's just the att modem that they provided to them which is one of those all-in-one kind of dealio things which is fine i mean a lot of people run that and there's no shame it does what it needs to do but he's looking for a little bit more performance and a little bit more control over his network setup so with the help of tp-link we're gonna make that happen [Music] okay first off let me clear the air yes tp-link did send all these omada devices over but no this is not sponsored no they did not pay me so any review i give is my own they don't get any chance to see this video or edit it in any way so the review i give of this stuff is 100 authentic so let's go over what they sent over um all these things are from their o model line which is designed to be that in between uh power home user and business level network setups so i sent over four things let's put these aside i'll go over them one by one okay let's start with their router slash firewall this is the tp-link omada all these are going to be omada er 605 and your router is essentially going to be the brains of your entire home network it's going to be what gives you the features that you're looking for in terms of setting up vlans managing a vpn you know managing all the users on your network etc so having a good router is extremely important next we have the switch now this is a pretty solid switch that they sent over this is the 10 port oh man these model names are going to kill me tlsg2210mp it's it's their 10 port poe gigabit switch so this is awesome because it has poe now poe is power over ethernet and what that allows you to do is you know if you're somebody who has cameras or other equipment that requires network connectivity but also power a lot of them can be configured using poe which means you just run one cable for power and for networking makes things so convenient when setting up access points or cameras or any other you know hardware places where you don't have to run power so so yes while it is a 10 port switch you do get eight rj45 ports and two sfp ports so sfp isn't very common in a home setup so okay uh we also get a shiny new access point this is the tp-link omada eap660 hd this is a wi-fi six router so using the ax wi-fi protocol and the cool thing about this is that it is poe meaning we have a poe switch we can run power and network directly to this without having to run a dedicated power line now one thing i did notice about the hardware that they sent me specifically the router and the switch is that the router does contain a 2.5 gigabit port meaning that you get higher than gigabit speeds but our switch is only gigabit ports so if you were gonna go for the same exact setup i would recommend picking a switch that has at least a couple 2.5 gigabit ports or just step it up and go to 10 gigabit uh that way you get the full bandwidth out of this access point but everything's fine it's gonna work but i just thought that was kind of funny last but not least we have the uh controller now this is the oc 200 i believe they have two different controllers this is the smaller one or more budget one now what this is going to do is allow you to tie all your omada devices together into one kind of ecosystem one gui to manage all your devices and you technically don't need this you can run the omada software on your own hardware whether that's you know a tiny little computer that you have laying around or if you have a home server you can run their software on that you don't need this but this just makes things a lot easier and they sent it over so we're going to use it now let's talk about prices before we set things up what i was told by the representative at tp-link was that for their controllers the oc 200 is 89.99 you can step up to the oc 300 for 159.99 for the access point you are looking at 179.99 for the switch this one is 149.99 you can step up to the xhp m2 model for 349.99 and for the router you are looking at sixty dollars which pretty solid okay so that's all the devices okay so let's explain the plan of attack for this now in a home network it's normally comprised of four things your modem which only purpose is to connect you to your isp and that's pretty much it what is my purpose connect you to your isp that's pretty much it oh my god yeah welcome to the club pal the next piece is generally your router slash firewall this is going to be your main you know tp links your linksys your netgears you know the standard routers you see when you go to best buy next is your switch now what a switch does is essentially gives you access to way more ports than your general routers are going to provide so a lot of routers come with normally four ports you can get switches with up to 48 ports depending on how many wire devices you want in your home or business and the last piece would be your access point this is going to be what ties all your wireless devices together now if you are thinking wait i only have a router in my house and i can do all that yeah most consumer routers are essentially a router a switch and an access point built into one you don't have to separate these things but in our case we have a device for each thing which generally gives you better performance and a more rich feature set so what's the layout how are we going to wire this so the wiring is going to be pretty straightforward we have a modem from that modem we are going to run a single cable directly over to our router from that router we have three ports we can use one of those is going directly to the switch and now that we have poe on our switch we can run a single cable directly from the switch to the access point connecting it to the network and supplying it power and last but not least we have the hardware controller now this is poe which is awesome so again we can run a single cable from the switch directly to the controller have it supplied power have a supplied network activity and just let it do its thing so let's actually go take a look at it okay so we are in the network room aka your son's closet right yes yeah so luckily with his house he has a centralized location where all of the network is run into making it easy to kind of you know connect everything to all the hardwired devices in the house so here you can see the lone modem router switch access point combo that was provided by att and this is the old setup this was running your entire home network right yep yeah so this will be an upgrade now we still need it obviously the modem is what's going to be tying you to your isp so you still need this but from here we are running a single cable directly from the modem over to our router let me pull that out we have this cable running directly from our modem to our router and the rest of these are running to other devices elsewhere in the house but only one connection directly back to the modem the other thing is that one of these is also running to our switch so that would be trust me it's one of these blue ones so one of those balloons is running to our switch now that is the biggest piece of hardware we have in our setup so you can see one of those is running to one of our eight rj45 ports and then the rest of these are outputs directly to devices within our network now one of these is going directly to our controller like i mentioned before and you can see that tiny little guy hiding here there you go just one cable directly to the switch powered over poe and it's doing its thing monitoring all the other hardware and the rest of these are either running to just ports in the bedroom that's already hardwired and one of them is running to our access point that i will walk over there and show you let me get this thing set up back to how it was before nice and neat anything's neat when you have covering to hide the ugliness so let's go check out the access point here is the access point our plan is to install it somewhere centralized in the home now this is a two-story home and we do have this loft area so pretty much this is going to be your best spot now luckily we have already run the cable from the closet all the way up through the attic and now you can see it hanging out right above us it's pretty easy to install this thing it comes with a bracket we've already installed it it's four screws you can sell it on a wall on a ceiling we're going on the ceiling so i'll show you how easy it is to do now don't call osha so like i mentioned before this is poe so when i plug this in one cable we should get lights yay and it's easy enough to install just slide it in to the grooves this only took like 10 minutes last time it's super easy super easy trust me go in come on get it up just like that super easy oh but in all seriousness um had i had a slightly bigger ladder it probably would have been easier but that's basically it you plug in the cable you mount the bracket and you essentially just fit it in and now you have an access point so with everything connected we now have to set it up luckily uh with the yomada setup they say it's super easy with the controller so let's check it out okay back at our desk and we essentially have everything configured now everything's connected this is the user guide for the controller that we are looking at here and you can see the typical network topology we are following that essentially to a t we have our modem then if you remember our modem is connected to our router our router to our switch and from our switch we are going to our hardware controller into our access point so exactly how they have it listed here is what we have configured so with the hardware controller you have two options of setting it up you have remote management and local management and we're doing local management so i'm not going to touch remote management at all we are going with the local management setup now with a lot of these omada products you don't necessarily need the hardware controller to be able to configure them and get all the features out of them so they're all going to have their own management gui so if you just want to buy the omada access point and throw it in your network setup as is you can do that and have access to its own gui same with the router same with the switch they don't need the hardware controller but the hardware controller just makes it easier but in our case setting up the hardware controller um what you need is access to your router's configuration to essentially set up the hardware controller so we got on a wired connection and went to the default gateway of the router which was 192.168.0.1 from there we could check our dhcp tables to see what ip address was signed to our controller and go to that directly so in our case we just took it and set it to a static ip address so we wouldn't have to worry about it changing down the line and we just knew what it was in our case that was 192.168.0.5 so the router was set up configured we got the ip address for the controller so then just go to the ip address for the controller and click through all the setups it will detect all of the tp-link omada devices on your network and give you a dashboard to see and control everything and that's what we are looking at here now i will give it to them the omada gui for your network is extremely clean it is leaps and bounds better than a lot of gui's you see with typical network devices in the consumer field i will say it looks eerily similar to ubiquiti's unify setup so i know they're directly competing with them but this this generally looks almost exactly the same so positive or negative you you be the judge of that but if we go in here um you can see simply if we go over to devices you will see all the devices we have configured and the ip address associated with them the status and here we have our router this would be our switch and this is our access point all connected all ready to go and you can see obviously there's a long uptime here because we installed this to test it out a couple weeks ago just so we had a bit of knowledge about this system prior to making a video so this is what the controller gives you easy access to all your devices easy access to all the features on those devices for example say you want to control users on your network it's extremely easy to do through the omada setup you can go over to clients and it will give you an entire list of all the clients that are on your network it will show whether they're connected through wi-fi or through lan you can click on one of those and if you want to look at the statistics to see you know how much data they're using what channel they're on how much data they've used in the past you can do that you can go over to configuration you can set a rate limit if you find that you know this device is using way too much bandwidth you can set a limit on that you can give them a fixed ip or static ip directly from this field and back in our list if you want to block somebody you can simply hover over them and go over to here and click block and just like that that user is blocked from the internet this is this is a good feature to have you know if you have kids that you want to you know take their devices offline at a certain time i believe you can set certain timings for blocking devices directly in the software and i mean it's just easy it's easy it's simple it's clean to do a lot of these things so one thing we did before was set up a guest network which was again super easy um to do that you go over to settings at the bottom left from here you have a lot of access to your more kind of power user settings on your network this is where all the cool features are going to be and i'm not going to cover all that in this video i will be making a follow-up video where we go much more in depth about all the features of the old model line and how to configure them and walking through all the settings but in this case i just want to show you the basics so you go into here you can go into wireless networks and you can see we have two set up now by default you're going to have you know your basic one set up as the default configuration but then you have the ability to go in and add more now the amount you can add will be determined by which access point you purchase i believe the one we have allows three you would simply just click create a new wireless network down here i'm not going to do that we already have two but i will edit the one that we added to show you you give it a name you specify what bands you want that running on 2.4 or 5 gigahertz or both make sure you have this guest network checkbox enabled this was kind of confusing to me at least initially i went into the default network and i checked guest network because i assumed because this is how it works on a lot of consumer routers is that it would just simply kind of duplicate this network except make it a guest one and that's not what happened so i was kind of confused there then turns out you just have to create a new one and then make that a guest network so after that you can just specify the security most of you are just going to go with wpa personal specify a wi-fi security key and there are a lot more advanced settings you can go in here with if you have vlan set up and you want this to be on another vlan you can do that but with a guest network anyway it's kind of already its own vlan so that seems a little unnecessary but you know if if you're setting up another lan wi-fi network that's not a guest network but you want it on a separate vlan you can do all that here i'll cover that all in a separate video another cool feature of this is that if you go down to the controller settings here you will see some settings for our controller you can specify if you want a static ip assigned to it or just to let it default to using dhcp and having your router assign an ip to it now it's just up to you whatever you want to do it doesn't matter the cool feature though is that all these devices have a fallback ip address which is extremely useful if you've ever set up a network where maybe you're resetting certain devices and maybe you reset your router which was your dhcp server now all your static ips are gone and you don't know what the ip of your device is anymore in this case if that ever happens our fallback ip address for the controller will always be 192.168.0.253. another cool thing about the omada line is that there is a dedicated tp-link omada app so you can do everything from the comfort of your phone if you know you're that kind of person who likes doing most of your stuff from your phone but yeah that's it um honestly it was an easy setup everything connected just as expected we got directly into the router gui from there we found our controller ip address and once you go into the controller it generally just auto detects everything for you which is awesome and the main benefit of the controller meaning that if you want to add omada products down the line you simply plug them in go to your controller and they will be detected and ready to go within seconds so yeah general first impressions very easy setup there are a lot of features that are provided to you that aren't necessarily there in a lot of consumer network equipment to nitpick um there are some bugs in the gui that we found just from you know a couple of days of sifting through there and using it one major one being that you can block a user from the omada app on your phone but you can't unblock them so you have to log into a computer to unblock that user and on the forums they do say that they're working on this so i expect this to be resolved relatively soon but it's kind of a major issue all right well everything's set up only one thing to do is test if it's even faster let's do that okay so we are outside on the back patio and it's uh pretty stormy so we're going to try to wrap this up quick but we did run speed tests on the old network versus the new network just to make sure that with a new access point and all the new hardware we were actually getting a performance increase not only within the house but outside in general making sure that we have better range and all that good stuff so with that said running it on the old one we were getting three uh megabits down which is terrible and that's to be expected that was with the att all in one modem tucked away in a closet essentially in the back of the house so with the new access point with the new tp-link omada access point in an actual good location running wi-fi six we were getting about 80 down so that's 20 something times faster which honestly i i wasn't surprised that it's faster but i'm surprised that it was that much faster so your mileage may vary whatever your old hardware is versus the new one where the location of your access point is all that's going to be oh god all that's going to be a factor in upgrading your network setup and one thing to note is that tp-link does have more access points they do have ones that can go outdoors so if you do have a large yard or a large property you can set up multiple access points with omada and have just a huge amount of coverage so that's it that's all we have for the network upgrade thanks a whole lot to tplink for sending that over i do believe their a model line is pretty solid they do have a couple of software issues i think they can resolve but overall it was a pleasant experience i'd recommend that if you're looking for a network upgrade in the future and want kind of everything in one nice cohesive package so i will be going over more in-depth um settings and features of the o model line so make sure to check that out i'll post a link up here when it's ready if it's not there then i haven't finished the video yet so that's it i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something if you like this type of content be sure to subscribe thank you for watching and i will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 13,083

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Id: hsJ0bxGVZDs

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021