Climate Pledge Friendly
This little unit is really handy and works as advertised. I bought it to use on a cruise, but I've found it useful for one other task which is connecting a PC without wifi to my home network: The TP Link TL-WR902AC connects to the wifi, and an Ethernet cable runs between the TP Link and the PC. The TP link provides an IP address to the PC, and then acts as a wifi client on my wifi network. Most people aren't going to need this, but I work on old PCs that usually have no wifi adapter in them.
Up front, I will add that the directions for the TL-WR902AC are very good, and should guide non-technical users through the steps to get things running based on their specific needs.
I also used the TP Link unit on board Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas ship in July 2022. The idea was to purchase wifi for one device (the TL-WR902AC), and then use the TL-WR902AC to allow multiple devices to connect. The design is simple: The TL-WR902AC is the single client on the ship's wifi network, and then it broadcasts a new/different wifi signal and SSID that you can connect your devices to. I used a laptop PC to connect to the TL-WR902AC with an Ethernet cable to navigate the admin web interface on the TL-WR902AC, and configure it to connect to the ship's wifi. This technically all worked, but had at least a couple of problems with usability. First, the ship's wifi drops the connection after some amount of time of inactivity and requires that you log in again in the web interlace where you provide the username and PIN that you created when purchasing a wifi connection for 1 device. Because the TL-WR902AC isn't a PC or computer, there is no way for it to hold open the connection with a continual ping or similar. It might have been possible to leave the laptop PC running all the time and have it continually reach out to the internet to hold open the connection, but the second problem was that ship's Internet access was slow and intermittent. Even from a single smartphone, the Internet access was bad, inconsistent, and slow. So that complicated the use of the TL-WR902AC because it was not always clear where or why the connections were breaking down. This is not the fault of the TL-WR902AC, however. If the ship's internet connection had been more reliable, I might have been able to more effectively troubleshoot using the TL-WR902AC to share the connection using the single device. Being on a cruise, I did not take a ton of time to troubleshoot all of this, especially it became apparent that the ship's Internet connection was poor. Technically the TL-WR902AC worked so I won't ding it there.
I do wish the TL-WR902AC had a few more features: First, it would be good if it could show you a status of the devices using its wifi: Device IP, name (if available), Kilobits in/out, last connection time, etc. Yes you can call up the DHCP table but that was just one piece. Second, it would be great if the TL-WR902AC could be configured to make an intermittent ping or http request to an IP address or http link that I provide, on a schedule of every few seconds or minutes. The idea would be to hold open a connection out to the Internet over the wifi connection on the "WAN" side.
Third, I could not find a way in the TL-WR902AC's web interface to reconfigure the WAN wifi login information without going to setup wizard. This ultimately isn't a problem but it it would be nice if you could find the config without the wizard. You CAN do this with the wifi networks that you configure for your devices, but not the wifi network that the TL-WR902AC is the client on.
So, bottom line, this unit works, but you need to have some experience with working with these kinds of things and have some understanding of what you're trying to accomplish technically. The included directions are good to help novice users get running, but like many technical things when you run into problems then it helps to have a technical background to troubleshoot.
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
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