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Ethernet

Bond Bridge Pro supports Ethernet and Wi-Fi at the same time. In a professional installation, running a hardwired Ethernet cable — in addition to or instead of Wi-Fi — gives the most reliable control.1

When Both Are Connected

  • The bridge automatically prefers Ethernet for all cloud traffic.
  • Wi-Fi stays online as a backup and for local discovery on the Wi-Fi subnet.
  • The bridge announces itself on every network it's connected to — discovery tools will see it at two IP addresses, one per network.2

Troubleshooting Third-Party Local Control

Some local control system integrations may get confused when a bridge advertises itself on both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. They may interpret the two addresses as the bridge "changing IP" and fail to hold a stable connection.

If you see this on site:

  1. Report it to the integration's developer. A correctly-written local integration handles a dual-connected bridge without any special configuration on the installer's part.
  2. As a workaround, run the bridge on Ethernet only. See the procedure below.

Running Ethernet Only

To disable Wi-Fi so the bridge is only reachable over Ethernet:

  1. Open the Bond Home app.
  2. Tap the bridge, then Bridge Settings → Change Network.
  3. Tap the ⋯ (overflow) button in the upper right.
  4. Tap Forget Wi-Fi and confirm.

The bridge reboots. Its setup access point ("Bond Config XXX") may briefly appear during reboot but will disappear within about a minute, and will stay off as long as Ethernet remains healthy. After that, the bridge is only reachable at its Ethernet address.

Ethernet must be working

The Forget Wi-Fi option is only available when the bridge currently has a working Ethernet connection with an IP address. If Ethernet isn't ready, the app won't let you forget Wi-Fi — this prevents accidentally stranding the bridge with no network.

To re-enable Wi-Fi later, re-run the standard Wi-Fi setup from Change Network.

Advanced: Overriding Route Priority

By default, the bridge prefers Ethernet for cloud traffic whenever the Ethernet link is up. In some cases however, installers will connect Bond Bridge Pro to an offline ethernet segment that nonetheless has a DHCP server advertising a broken route. In these cases, you can use the local API to bump the Wifi route priority. 3

There is no UI for this in the Bond Home app today outside of vendor-specific WebGUIs.

  1. This guidance also applies to future Bond products that ship with an Ethernet port. ↩

  2. This is standard behavior for any device with two active network connections, per RFC 6762 (Multicast DNS) and RFC 6763 (DNS-SD). The bridge advertises the same hostname (<bondid>.local) and the same _bond._tcp service on both interfaces — only the A record (IP address) differs. ↩

  3. PATCH /v2/sys/eth with body {"route_prio": N} where N is 0–255. 0 means "use the firmware default" (128, higher than Wi-Fi STA's 100). To prefer Wi-Fi over Ethernet, set N below 100 (e.g., 50). GET /v2/sys/eth returns the current value. This setting is persisted and survives reboot. ↩