Review on Wi-Fi Mesh system TP-LINK Deco E4, 2-pack, white by Virot Wrintharawet ᠌

Name: Wi-Fi Mesh system TP-LINK Deco E4, 2-pack, white
Item: Wi-Fi Mesh system TP-LINK Deco E4, 2-pack, white
Rating: 3

April 13, 2023

Overall pretty good, an equal number of pros and cons.

The device itself searches for a firmware ate on some "cloud", downloads it itself (into itself, as I understand it) and reflashes itself. The user does not have access to the firmware files and, accordingly, the ability to manually flash the firmware.
On the mechanical side: there is no mounting either on the wall or on the ceiling - you can only put it on a table / cabinet / shelf. The operation indicator (changes color depending on the state) is located on top and is covered with decorative side walls - that is, you can see it only when looking strictly from above - hence it turns out that the maximum installation height is the desktop. But ask your employees or household members - who is ready to keep a WiFi hotspot on their desk half a meter from their heads? Although doctors have not yet proven the harmfulness of WiFi radiation, such a "neighborhood" will, to put it mildly, disturb.
The power supply is organized according to the "traditional" scheme - through a separate power supply unit with a pin connector. It is not clear why PoE was not made - after all, the Etrhernet ports of the device are 100 megabits, and implementing PoE over free wires would be as easy as shelling pears. But no - you have to worry about the presence of an outlet for the power supply. And the power cable is only a meter long.

Expensive, but at the same time quite a child's toy. All its work is covered in dark darkness - what it does inside it, to whom it transfers your data - no one knows.

Pros

Nice design, "range", ease of creating a network of the same type of devices by adding new ones, the presence of a second Ethernet port that allows you to use the device as an Ethernet switch in addition to WiFi.

Cons

Administration is only through the Android application (from a smartphone / tablet), there is no web management interface at all. An extremely narrow range of settings - in particular, there is no way to manually select a communication channel, type of encryption, and much, much more - all this is at the mercy of "artificial intelligence", which (according to the developers from TP-Link) is smarter than a system administrator and knows himself what options to use. Against this background, it even looks somehow strange that the user is allowed to come up with an access point name and set his own password for connection :-) Impossibility of remote administration from an external network. The 22nd port is open, but neither the login, nor even the password is known to anyone - it seems that TP-Link has left a "loophole" for itself to manipulate the device secretly from the owner. There is no documentation - all the information is presented in the style of an advertising booklet. The Android app is built like a "wizard" with pretty pictures and dumb instructions like "shake your phone to share your WiFi settings". (See further in the comments)