What Router are you using?

Brilliant.  Thanks.

what you are looking at is referred to as an access point, which may mean its not routing? It also states you need a cloud access licence to use. I would say that is more for large open spaces such as  a mall where randoms will be in and off it all day long and control of it has to be centrally managed.

Nick, I am quite familiar with Meraki, and I can't see many applications where it is relevant at home. It really is, as Gary said, designed to be use as a wireless access point and controller. The controller provides security and access controls for different users/devices accessing your wireless network. The logic of the wireless controller with Meraki is usually remotely hosted as a cloud type service. This allows many distributed wireless access points to connect to the cloud to provide a consistent access and security policy for a customers distributed network... as you can see not really that appropriate  for single wireless AP in a home environment.

i would also say most routers mentioned here on this forum are consumer grade routers and are quite straightforward and tend to be filled with lots of consumer features. I wouldn't say this is overkill.

More powerful (and read expensive) commercial routers won't typically have these consumer bells and whistles unless you configure them as such and will usually support more powerful routing protocols and will have often have greater processing capacity to be able police and rate adapt the different DSCP marked traffic between networks... These is what I would call overkill for the home especially if simply connecting to the public internet, as a lot of this is meaningless to the internet.

Simon

Thank you, Simon and Gary.

My home logistics have reqiured that I have two or three access points to give adequate performance at the perimeter.  To date, I have used bridged Apple Extremes and an Express.  At work we use Merakis to cover discontiguous areas.  I am always glad to learn about the enterprise side.

Nick

Nick. Get the asus ac 68u and see how you get on with coverage. If needed you could then add some simple wireless access points. The asus is a beast though, i can get reception down the end of my street on mine.

Gary,

That is the plan.  It arrives tomorrow.  Busy for a couple of weeks after.  I will report back when I can. 

I do not live in a castle (footprint is 1150 sq ft); but the best spot for my ROUTER is currently in the NE basement corner, and the Wi-Fi ACCESS POINT needs to be three floors up on the floor of the (hot/cold) attic, or the ceiling of the second floor.

I could probably optimize better, with DSL modem in the attic, too, with a pilot-light-power-switch located at a more convenient altitude.  Cheap to do in the greater scheme, eh?

Nick

Your house sounds awesome

i dont suppose you have ethernet everywhere with that?

No Ethernet in the attic yet.  If it meant I could go from three Wi-Fi access points to one, I would be tempted to go for it.  One of my Extremes is currently functioning as a wireless repeater, which works better than I expected.  I was told this will degrade overall Wi-Fi performance.  Still, my NDX experiences fewer iRadio dropouts over Wi-Fi than over copper.  Hard to believe, I know.

Nick

the ac element will only be of benefit if you have devices that supportit. the nds is not one.

however the router can bond two bands together or something, all very clever to improve standard n performance.

ac wireless is great though, I have average throughuts of 30-40 MB/s on wireless.

and within 12 feet of my wifi access point I get 1.3Gbps on 802.11ac - which is a better headline speed than my wired connection - although effective throughput is a lot less than 1.3Gbps because of collision avoidance and overhead.

Simon

Remember WiFi is half duplex and wired is full duplex, so that makes a lot of difference even without taking in the additional overhead of WiFi.

Half duplex means that you transmit and receive alternately.

Full duplex is concurrent transmit and receive.

It was not very expensive for me to get the installers from my hi fi shop to run some ethernet cable in my home.  I kept it minimal -- just a connection from the server area to the living room.  It was just a few hundred dollars, which one can easily spend on fancy new wifi routers and repeaters.

I use Vodafone LTE EasyBox904 (incl. Router) and have a wireless connection to a
Linksys Bridge WET610N. The bridge, NAS and Uniti2 are connected via LAN cable
to a Linksys SE2500 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch.
Bridge, NAS, Uniti2 are in the same room. Router is in another room.

"Beast" is right, garyi!   The one AC-68U is covering basement to the top, with more bars than the three access points I had before.  The only fly in the ointment is my WDS wireless leg is not working.  I seem to recall that router-to-router connections using WDS often require same-make routers to be successful.  I have an old network printer that relies on this leg.  One solution begets a new problem!

That's what keeps it fun!

After stabilizing the new router, I changed my DSL modem from the ZyXEL PK5001Z provided by CenturyLink to a Linksys X2000 I had lying around.  The modem change made no difference I can perceive, and did not solve the buffer issue on my wired-NDX playing Avro Baroque 24, which does and always did play fine on my wired-Squeezebox Touch.  It is a good thing that the DLNA and system automation benefits are good enough that I still want to keep the NDX.  I hope Naim will provide a fix for the iRadio stuttering -- I bet they will.

Nick 

I have no inherent comms problems with the system, but my PC is connected to the same network as the streamer, and this is less than ideal.  I used to have everything connected to a Hauwei HG533 ADSL2+ router; it works fine but it's a cheapo unit that does 'just enough to do the job' and probably doesn't have particularly good control of the RFI.

So I tried a very simple L2 unmanaged switch to separate them - a D-Link DES-105.  It's a 100Base-TX device using just 5V supply; I reasoned that it may inject less RFI into the network, and also separate away some of the network traffic.

There is a definite sound improvement with it in place:

Mostly cleaner HF and more detail.

There's possibly also tighter bass present, but I'm not at all sure of this bit.

Nick, Asus do make a little range extender.  That might do the trick for you if needed.

Thanks, Bart.  I will look for it.

Funny that that aspect of Wi-Fi is not better standardized.  The all-Apple Wi-Fi solution pulled it off.

I could also put the money into a more modern Wi-Fi printer, of course.  And my wiring-guy is always happy to accommodate, too!  I hate to send the old printer to the recycler -- it is 802.11b/WEP only -- no longer supported -- or wired, and otherwise works fine.  "Cheap-geek's conundrum".

Nick