I also tried the same long group of wire segments without any repeaters.. the AP gets power, but struggles very poorly trying to communicate. The switch doesn't light up the link signal.

So for fun, I went into the switch GUI and enabled "extend mode" for that port, which is supposed to increase max PoE segment length to 250m but only at 10mbit/sec. That worked.

For fun I also tried the full length of segments with no repeaters, both with and without PoE, and neither worked. My rough guess is that all of the segments add up to somewhere around 200m, with quite a few RJ45 connections along the way -- perhaps a dozen of those.

Conclusion: this all bodes very well for when we set it up for real on-site later this month. A single repeater should do the job.

I haven't found any real value to the managed versus unmanaged switch for a long term installation there. The switch I have is not under the Omada wing of TP-Link, so the System Controller stuff doesn't see it.

The managed switch does have the "detect when AP is dead and power-cycle it feature", which on the surface sounds quite useful. But then it warns that this feature can be catastrophic during an AP firmware update.. simply an accident waiting to happen, that.

So I think we'll end up deploying the un-managed model there. I may hang onto the other one for myself, or just return it for a refund.