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Fixing Salt Fiber Box Wi-Fi AP Separation

Switching ISP is never easy, be it at home or for your business. This time, the WLAN was the biggest obstacle.

What works today

Salt has a very compelling offer:

  • 10gbe uplink
  • DECT phones (untested)
  • 2.4GHz and 5GHz WLan
  • Digital TV via Apple TV 4K app
  • IPv4 NAT
  • IPv6 public /64 subnet
  • Backup and restore of the Box-Configuration

After the usual two to three week wait for the cable companies technicians to plug the fiber outside of the house in the correct spot for the uplink to work.

Do they actually offer the full 10Gbps? It is not clear for now because I have no hardware exceeding speeds of 1Gbps

No NAS, no printers, no (apple|chrome) cast, no gaming, no ping?

After the initial rush of joy with the working connection I noticed the absence of the printer first.

The symptoms are weird:

How to disable AP Separation step by step

First let us get into the WLAN settings on the default IP. You can find your device on Linux with ip r | grep default over HTTP without encryption.

Warning: Doing this without a cable connection might trigger some WiFi connection problems. So using a cable speeds the process up by a lot.

  1. Login to the admin panel
    • default user: admin
    • default password: admin
    • Hint: This might be a great moment to change the admin password
  2. Switch to expert on the top left
  3. Go to WLAN

Now we have to do this twice for 2.4GHz and 5GHz:

  1. Combined view
    1. Under $(GHz) -> SSID Enable: Off
    2. Save settings
  2. WLAN $(GHz)
    1. Set AP Isolated: Yes
    2. Save settings
  3. Combined view
    1. Under $(GHz) -> SSID Enable: On
    2. Save settings
    3. Under $(GHz) -> SSID Enable: Off
    4. Save settings
  4. WLAN $(GHz)
    1. Set AP Isolated: No
    2. Save settings
  5. Combined view
    1. Under $(GHz) -> SSID Enable: On
    2. Save settings

Now repeat for the other frequency.

Update: Finally, Administration -> Reboot and then reboot the device.

After the reboot internal pings should be possible. However, it took my setup a minute or two until clients could establish p2p connections.

Other minor complaints

Box itself

The configuration is encrypted. People on the internet report that they used to be able to download the configuration as a text file.

Dear Salt, please revert that change. I am sure your engineers would not mind having plain-text to parse instead of this proprietary format.

TV

After testing the apps of ZDF, Netflix, Youtube and SaltTv the verdict in quality is pretty clear:

ZDF and Netflix deliver a clear full HD picture.

Youtube sometimes has a slow start, but after a couple of seconds the image clears to full HD (provided the requested video is available in full HD or better).

The SaltTv app however, is not great. All the channels have visible artifacts. This is especially bad when watching a 4K channel one would not expect to see artifacts on a downscaled image.

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