It’s been computer network here for the past couple of days. A couple of problems: smart switch broke down. ADSL has gone as low as 1Mbps at times and, while I haven’t contacted them, if they wanted to be awkward my minimum guaranteed line speed here is 0.4Mbps. Those plus some long standing Wi-Fi niggles. It’s been quite a bit of a (combined) outlay but I’ve had new switch, AP and router to set up.

The router does both ADSL and, via a SIM card slot, 4G. I (hoping I can find another deal like this when this expires) got an EE data card with 120GB that is supposed to last for 12 months before expiring for £50. EE 4G signal is good here and the router is quite flexible. At the moment I have it set so the guest LAN and some commonly used low bandwidth sites (eg. Mudcat) use ADSL and anything else on 4G but I can tweak that as needed – main one is to keep some of the 120GB allowance for the 4GB software downloads I sometimes want. Both WANs will fall back to the other if it goes down.

The switch triggered some reorganisation in the living room and I’ve now been able to locate the room’s AP, near the door rather than the far corner of the room by the tv. This has greatly improved the signal for eg. the camera in the bed room (the only one not hard wired).

The AP is the same model as the newer one of the 2 I had been using. Now having a matched pair (and both with some roaming settings the older one didn't have) has improved roaming (I’ve one a AP in LR, one in my room, mostly using same IDs and security and mobile devices should change over as they are moved) a lot. Whereas before, there could be long pauses before the changeover and worse, I could sometimes have to disconnect and reconnect my phone and tablet to make the connection to the best/closest AP, things seem pretty seamless now.

I was cursing the set up this morning though after I updated the firmware on both APs. I was ready to congratulate myself on a job well done when I found my phone would no longer connect. Turns out it doesn’t like WPA3 with the new firmware so I had to change all the security settings for the SSIDs on both bands and on 2 AP from “Mixed WPA3/WPA2” to “WPA2 only” to feel sure everything would work. I could have done without that but computers seem to have ways of creating something else to frustrate you...