SOLVED: Fixing an “Unidentified Network” error with our TL-WA850RE Wireless Repeater

We have a wireless repeater in our house which boosts the signal to a full five bars at even the farthest reaches of the house. It’s worked pretty well except needing to be rebooted here and there but recently it completely stopped working. If you’re connecting to your repeater but then getting “Unidentified Network” and no internet connectivity then read on to see how I solved this.

Its pretty simple, you just update the firmware.

I only wanted to write this article in the hopes that somebody else in my position will see that its safe to do so. I spent a few hours trying various combinations, rebooting, reconnecting, restarting the main Wi-Fi, the list goes on.

I was reluctant to update the firmware because my edition as printed on the back is a TL-WA850RE(UK).

The UK bit isn’t mentioned elsewhere. On the website it lists two firmware’s with nothing after the main model and then latest firmware on the site lists (EU). I figured, why bother putting it on there if it doesn’t make any difference so I wanted to solve it without potentially bricking the device.

After exhausting all other possibilities I took the plunge and installed the firmware.

The one I downloaded was from this page:

• http://www.tp-link.com/en/download/TL-WA850RE_V1.html#Firmware

It was called “TL-WA850RE(EU)_V1.20_140826” released on 26/08/14.

I made a wired connection to the repeater, logged in to its admin panel at tplinkextender.net and updated the firmware. After a brief reboot it came back online successfully.

The only thing I would note is that I then kept getting “you are not authorised to view this router” errors when trying to visit tplinkextender.net in my browser.

I think that this was just a caching issue with the browser however for a quick solution to this, the new firmware adds tplinkrepeater.net (repeater instead of extender) as an alternative admin panel access point.

Logging in via this domain allowed me to quickly set up the router. I chose to give it a different name as the main network so that I could be sure I was connecting to it.

Then I moved it back to its location, waited for it to boot back up and the house finally had 5 bars again.