Tartandon

My setup in rural highlands of Scotland links two buildings (A) and (B), and consists of a Wifi mesh in building (A). The main router links three other Starlink mesh routers placed strategically around the house. Big house with 5 bedrooms. The ethernet from the main Starlink Router goes straight into an 8 port Gb switch which feeds via ethernet my laptop, and Mac, etc. Another feed from the switch goes to a POE connection and out to an external 5 Ghz Ubiquiti Nanostation. This bridges to another external 5 Ghz Nanostation and POE on building (B). From (B’s) Nanostation, ethernet runs to a small Ubiquiti 5Ghz Aircube hub. So Building (B) has its own wifi area, and it has a Hive thermostat controlling the heating in building (B). This can be monitored and also controlled from building (A). The evening speeds in (B) are enough to satisfy a gaming enthusiast (?), probably around minimum of 60mbs down and 20 Mbs up. Latency between 30 to 50. The mesh speed in (A) varies on location and time of day, but with 3-5 adult users streaming with no buffering, we are very happy. Oh, and loads of things attached to the network. Bye bye to BT with ADSL broadband of 12 down and 1 up, which cost a lot for endless frustration. Starlink is worth every penny. I even tried the old Huawei router with GiffGaff SIM. GiffGaff chucked me off for having too many users and too many devices feeding of the Wifi.

The three nodes are Starlink. No other make of mesh nodes on my network. I have two ethernet dongles (Starlink, of course). I had tried to make an improvement by connecting the main router via Cat6 cable to a switch. Then fed a CAT 8 cable to node#1 from the switc.h. Chaos ensued… I removed the cable connection from the switch to node#1 and rebooted the system. Everything settled down! I will post a photo but basically it is a wireless setup apart from the connections from the switch.. To get through the thick wall, I placed one node about 15 feet away from the main router, and a second node directly on the other side of the thick concrete black wall in close proximity to the first. Seemed to do the trick for that problem, but third node is further away from the main router , maybe thirty feet, and has a lower transmission rate.

I have three mesh nodes plus the main router. I thought. I should try improving the signal strength and RX rate by following the router advice (above). So I bought a CAT8 ethernet cable and a Starlink ethernet adapter. Well, the ethernet link from the main router to node#1 initially resulted in a strong signal and every device in the house seemed to want to feed off that node. But pretty soon afterwards, the network went into meltdown and rebooting, etc. did not help. My experience tells me that Starlink mesh layout does not like ethernet from main router to first node. It is stable when there is a wireless connection between main router and the nodes. Distance and thick walls are a factor: they degrade the signal strength as nodes are placed. The main router signal is not that strong and so the nodes cannot be too far away. Maybe generation 3 will fix that?

I am a novice but I used bypass mode only when I wanted to try out an old tp-link router. Bypass mode is accessed via the App / settings (scroll down to second last button). Back to using the Starlink router. I have it connected it via ethernet adapter to a 8 port Tp-link switch which is connected to an Omada box for the PTP section of my network. I had no problem in getting the SSID and password broadcast, it just does.. Making the password secure? A mix of characters and numbers? Again Joseph Cristina videos may help…

When using the Starlink App, I saw this BLOCK button when checking the network devices connected to my mesh routers. Why would someone want to block a mesh router? I don’t fancy pushing the button in case I do some harm to my network and have to go back to step one. Just curious….

Bonjour Sorry my FRench is very poor, but if you look at Joseph Cristina excellent videos he wil show you how to bypass the Starlink router and use your TP-Link device. Concete or very thick walls are a problem for wifi, I have learned this from my efforts. Here is the link for Joseph Cristina’s channel