Amped AP300 High Power Wireless-300N Smart Access Point

In my installation I had an internet connected Blu-ray player in my media room, and connected it to my Linksys wireless router at the other end of my house with a long Cat 5e ethernet cable (standard, 8 conductor) through the crawlspace. But now I wanted to add wireless access to the area around the Blu-ray. So I unplugged the cat 5e cable from the Blu-ray and plugged it into the Amped 300N and, with the standard configuration options, it worked great. I added a short Cat 5e cable from the Amped to the Blu-ray, so it is still wired, and I have wireless internet access from that end of the house. I also have 3 additional wired ports on the Amped for adding other wired network equipment. I used the "More Settings" menu options to configure the things that should be changed like administrator user name and password (under Management | Password). The menus and options are very similar to those of my Linksys router setup.Things you need to know:1) The "Smart" initial Setup wizard works fine but it retains the factory network ID (SSID) and password each time through the wizard rather than your new changes (not smart). So if you go through the wizard once and change the password. Then later use the wizard again to change the SSID, the factory password will be on the wizard page, not your new password. If you are not aware, you will unknowingly reset the password back to the factory default, so you will not be able to access the network with your password - but rather only with the factory default password.2) The instructions say to use IP 192.168.1.240 for setup and configuration (as well as setup.ampedwireless.com). However, once plugged into your DHCP router, a new IP will be assigned to the Amped and 192.168.1.240 will not work (although setup.ampedwireless.com will). To obtain the currently assigned IP address, from a command line you can Ping setup.ampedwireless.com.3) The information about the PoE cable on inserts in the box and in the documentation is confusing and not correct. Here is what you need to know (from Amped support which was easy and helpful). If you are connecting to a standard router (like a Linksys) and are not using power over Ethernet (PoE), just use a standard (8 conductor) Cat 5 or 5e cable. Plug one end into the router and the other end into the Amped. If the 300N senses excess power on the cable, it will power off. If that happens, get a RJ46 cable connector and connect the standard Cat 5 cable to the Amped supplied 4 conductor cable and then into the 300N. In any case, no harm will be done.

Use CaseWhile I have a Ubiquiti WiFi setup in my home, there's a relatively small area where I want to be able have WiFi connectivity to my corporate network (to the house via MetroE fiber). While I could put the LANs together with VLAN tagging, I didn't really want to do that when a much simpler solution could be had instead. A single access point would suffice for the Surface Book that I use when not using a PC that's connected via Ethernet. There were some less expensive APs, but the Amped Wireless AP300 looked like it would be up to the task.AppearanceThe device arrived with a short Ethernet cable already plugged into the uplink port, a small switching AC/DC adapter, and two SMA antennas. The user is instructed to attach the antennas for use by a sticker that blocks the power jack. The unit isn't garish or unattractive. While a stand is included, it effectively encourages the user to stack the antennas, which isn't really the best idea. Screw slots (for wall mounting) round out the placement options. The power connector is a little tight against one of the antennas... it's not a big deal, but it would have been nice to space that out a bit more. There's a WPS button, a recessed reset button, an uplink Ethernet jack, and 4 x Ethernet jacks (just because, I guess).SetupActually getting everything assembled and hooked up only took a minute, but it kind of went downhill from there. Most access points have the same type of SoC that you'd use to make a router. This one is like that, in that it has a web server (for configuration), a DHCP server, and some other processing capabilities. The starting configuration caused my first issue... the AP300 comes configured with a static IP (192.168.1.240). Since that IP conflicted with another device on my LAN, the device proceeded to continually reboot. A SNMP message from one of my switches notified me of the condition, but that was 5 minutes into wondering if the unit was DOA. For the rest of the setup I unplugged the uplink port.I connected to the AP300 using a laptop, entering the default SSID and password. The starting authentication information was on a sticker attached to the uplink Ethernet cable (only significant because the unit doesn't come with a single piece of printed documentation). Once connected, I opened a browser (Edge) and connected to the AP300. I've attached an image of the setup screen. The setup wizard takes you through clock setup, SSID assignment, and setting the password. After you reboot (which takes a few minutes), you'll have to keep in mind that you'll need to connect to the new SSID.A couple things that I noticed...1.) the security was set to WPA, which I don't understand at all. Change it to WPA2 as soon as you can.2.) WPS is enabled by default. I turned it off. I honestly don't know who uses it, but you might want to check out the vulnerabilities inherent to WPS. It's nice that the AP300 allows you turn of WPS (not every device does).PerformanceThough the AP300 is touted as having "high power", it's not really the case. The radio power, along with the gain from the antenna puts this unit right around 23dBm, which is significantly lower than the 30dBm FCC limit. There are plenty of devices that are better, from a coverage standpoint. The device does let you _limit_ the power from there (yay?). I was consistently connecting at 144Mbit/s through a floor, which isn't bad. There is a rub, though... the uplink port (and all of the ports, for that matter are 100Mbit/s! It's a little disingenuous to claim 300Mbit/s speeds if they aren't going to be attainable. While it's true that the dual radios are really more to allow simultaneous transmissions, I really don't understand why you wouldn't opt for the incremental cost to have a 1Gbit/s uplink. Even from a device connectivity standpoint, 2x MIMO is not all that great. The good news is that Chariot runs did show the connection to be stable, and to transmit around 94Mbit/s (which makes sense, considering the bottleneck). Ultimately, the performance is good enough for the RDP and basic data transfer tasks I have.SPECIAL NOTEThe documentation seems to be missing some critical information. It is stated that you can use the non-uplink ports as PoE ports to power additional AP300s, which is actually a pretty interesting feature. While I wouldn't be interested in that, I can see where driving one or more PoE IP cameras off of the AP300 would save a bunch of money over buying PoE injectors, or a PoE switch... but there is a huge problem. There isn't any information about the 802.3 at/af, and there's a warning about using PoE Ethernet cables, which leads me to believe that the switch ports have passive power injection. You see, there's no such thing as a PoE Ethernet cable, so telling users to find 2 pair Ethernet cables is probably just to keep you from dropping 12/24/48V on your NIC. Good luck finding a two pair cable. FWIW, 802.3 PoE (either standard) is a negotiated power protocol... a standards-compliant port will not continually send power down a port unless it has successfully completed the handshake.ConclusionI decided to go with a basic access point because I didn't want/need 802.11ac performance - I'm not a big believer in buying capability that I don't expect to use. Unfortunately, while the AP300 does the job, it is too expensive to offset the performance issues. Real PoE ports would be a high value add, but they're not 802.3at (or 802.3 af). Not recommended

I have been going though many challenges lately with getting good wifi throughout my home. My space is 3000 square feet; 3 floors and a basement, and my router is in the basement (naturally). I live in a fairly dense, urban area, as well. As my children have gotten older and there are more wireless devices in my home, signal quality, throughput, and availability have all suffered greatly. Over the last six months, I've tried various combinations of access points and repeaters/extenders from Trendnet and TPLink and they've just not worked. Either there was no consistency of signal, or they just didn't work at all (e.g. two identical Trendnet access points that have a "repeater mode", but would not talk to each other!).I tried the Amped Wireless AP300 based on the reviews and am happy to say that it's working very well, by itself - with no repeaters yet, although I did order an SR300 at the same time but I haven't installed it yet. Clear instructions, easy packaging, and a signal strength of 80% on the second floor of my home (according to the Amped Wireless wi-fi analytics app). Highly recommended.