So, I've had Velops networks for several years now, and they're a solid, if not particularly configurable, consumer service, it provided me great service in my previous property on Virgin to when we moved around 2 years ago, I decided to put it in this new house too.
We initially had FTTC service, of around 60Mb, and had to keep the SR203 router in place running as a router, though with Wifi turned off (we have Sky Q and 4 mini boxes) with the Velops in Router mode in a network layer below the Sky router. We never experienced any NAT problems at all, and we've had solidish network performance, with the occasional pause, hiccup or momentary network losses, (30 seconds or so). The SR203 was connected into the Internet port of the Velops directly. (this is bit appears to be quite key)
The house is over a large area, we have 2 outbuildings, which need nodes of their own, and 2 velops nodes in different ends of the house to give Wifi coverage, which has always been solid and good. The nodes of the Velops are all ethernet backhaul connected, and allow them to communicate well over the network. Some of the Sky Q boxes are connected by ethernet into the Velops hubs, 2 are not, they're on their own Wifi between the Sky Q nodes.
this solution worked ok in the main, though, around every 1-2 weeks, we'd have an issue where the main Velops node would loose internet connection (we'd get the solid red light) and we'd loose the network. We also experienced in the same period an inability for the network devices to get DHCP addresses too and device would drop off the network, you'd then have to reboot either the closest Velops node, or the master node to fix this issue, sometimes both.
this was just how it was and how it worked, it was a tolerable pain, but a pain it was. We then got FTTP earlier this year. and pretty much everything continued in the same mode of operation, every week or so, the Velops would effectively crash, every week or two, sometimes it would stay up for 3 weeks, sometimes it would need to be rebooted 4 times a week. all very random, but the same thing happened, loss of internet traffic and DHCP, but the wifi inside the house, remained up.
So, after doing some more research, I thought I'd try Velops in bridge mode, so I switched it into bridge mode, which worked fine and all the devices needed a reboot, but continued to work on the network SSID, without any issues.... the problem was, the same issue with loosing the internet and the Velop nodes loosing the network continued however. It looked to be something with the Sky router network storming the Velops and the Velop main node, falling over in surrender everytime this happened. no idea what caused it, and we did see it often happen around 11pm of an evening on many, many occasions.
so, I decided to help out the Velops by putting a network switch, in between the Sky Router and the Velops node WAN port (i.e. Sky router into the switch on a port and the Velops into a port on the switch). Nothing fancy really, I already had the TP link 16 port POE unmanaged switch in the network anyway, as we have IP based security cameras, and numerous other things, running over ethernet anyway. now that the network was flat and all under the Sky router, the Velops are just wifi AP's now effectively.
anyway, since it's been configued this way, the ethernet switch seems to have stopped the issues of the network storm from the SR203 making the Velops fall over and the Velops has remained rock solid, no wobbles, no pauses, hiccups, or issues at all, so, for now, (and we're only a couple of weeks in), I'm calling this a resolution to this irksome problem with Velops and SR203. (probably, hopefully)
I'll come back later and advise, if it remains, solid and without issues, but so far, it's much, much more solid. (he says, hoping).. 🙂
Kindest,
AG
