Clueless (mostly) Engineer - Setting up multiple Accesspoints

One of the things I never took the time to understand is networking.  I guess it's time.  

 

What I have now:  I have two accesspoints. My cable network's modem/accesspoint provides wifi access and 4 non-PoE ports.

I also have a 2nd TP-Link wifi accesspoint, with 4 non-PoE ports.  So, I have two SSID, with one access point on 10.0.0.x, and the other on 192.168.0.x.  

 

I've been using it for years with no trouble.

 

My PC is connected to a TP-Link port (not sure why I connected it to the TP-Link.  It might seem more logical to connect it to the xfinity port.  I think it had something to do with the accesspoint setup, before I got the xfinity accesspoint). The TP-link WAN port is connected to the xfinity access point, and the xfinity access point is connected to the internet.  Pretty straight forward (I think).

 

But now I have to make another change.  I have a PoE Camera, that needs a powered PoE Switch.  I have a TP-Link PoE Switch.   So, I'll be adding another set of ports.  I'm not entirely sure how i'm going to do this.  Or where I should do this.

 

I seem to have at least 2 options.   What I am going to try is this:

 

Option 1

1) Connect my PoE Camera, to a PoE port, on the TP-Link PoE Switch.

2) Connect the PoE Switch uplink/wan/ (or whatever that port is called), to a port on the  TP-Link access point.

3) no other changes to my setup.

 

Will that work?

 

Option 2: 

1) Connect my PoE camera, to a PoE port, on the TP-Link PoE Switch.

2) Connect my PoE switch to the xfinity access point to one of the non-PoE ports.

3) No other changes to my setup.

 

Basically, I'm trying to decide where to insert my  PoE Swithch.  Into the xfinity  Access point or the TP-Link  Access point?  Does it make any difference?  I'm kind of thinking that since I have other cameras, on the TP-Link Access point, via wifi, it might be better to connect the PoE camera to the xfinity access point.

 

Another concern.  I have to run some software on my PC.  Should it be able to find my PoE camera, regardless of which access point it is connected through?

 

Thoughts

Edited by MikeMSD, 25 February 2024 - 07:14 PM.

You could also get a PoE injector and circumvent the Switch if you only have 1 device and no plans on expanding.

The TP-Link Switch won't have a dedicated WAN Port so the port on the Switch does not matter IF you are running the default settings.

 

With the camera connected to one of the Ports of the TP-Link Switch, connect another port of the Switch to a LAN Port of the Router/AP you want to use.

Here it depends what network you want the Camera to be in. If your PC is on the TP-Link Network then it would be intuitive to place the Camera also in that network. This does not strictly matter though since both of your networks (10.0.0.x & 192.168.0.x) should be directly connected, thus routing works without further ado (again, given you are running default configs). There might be a case where the software you have mentioned requires your devices to be in the same Network however, that is often the case with Streaming Services.

I do have an injector but will have 3 cameras eventually. So I went with switch.

There was some mention of the pc being on the same network as the camera. But I'm going slow on this and haven't installed the software yet. I'm trying to understand the interconnections before I go further.

Both of my routers have a WAN port. I have the TP-link router WAN connected to the high speed LAN port on the xfinity router and my internet cable to the WAN port of the xfinity router.

I want to try and understand the significance of not having a WAN port on the Switch. Does that mean that any port on the switch just expands the switch network to be an extension of whichever local network it is attached to?

And that, as an example, would make my AP with 1 WAN and 4 LAN become an AP with 1 WAN and 7 LAN (3 non-PoE. 4 PoE), assuming my switch was a 5 port switch. All 7 connections would be part of the same LAN.

So how would a dedicated WAN on the switch change anything? Let me see if I understand. What it would do is seperate the two networks. Is that right?

I need a block diagram that explains the communication pathes.

I appreciate the help.

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The LAN Ports on the TP-Link APs are per default in a 'Bridged' Network state, which essentially works just like your PoE Switch.

Functionally, yes, by connecting your PoE Switch to your TP-Link AP LAN Port, you extend the amound of bridged interfaces.

Basic Layer 2 Switches do not differentiate between WAN and LAN Ports like Routers do.

 

Routers operate on OSI Layer 3 (IP Protocol), while Basic Switches operate on OSI Layer 2 (Ethernet Protocol).

The devices in your network require a 'Default Gateway' in order to know where to send traffic. The gateway is essentialy the doorway to the adjacent network.

 

So your xfinity router receives his IP Address from your ISP via the WAN port. Its LAN ports allow you to create a private subnet which will use the WAN port as the Gateway to the Internet.

Now you put your TP-Link AP/Router in this private subnet. In the same way, this TP-Link AP receives an IP Address on its WAN port, in turn the LAN ports allow for the creation of a private subnet.

The PoE Switch does not affect this subnet, but extends the available LAN Ports (I'm not going to get into VLANs here).

 

If you are running windows on the your pc you can open the CMD and type 'ipconfig /all' to see the IP Address it has as well as the Gateway, which is ideally the same IP that the WAN Port on your TP-Link AP has.

In turn, your TP-Link AP has the IP Address of your xfinity WAN Port as its Gateway. This way, your packets know how to reach the internet.