Wi-Fi coverage revisited - recommendations

Yes the Apple Wifi stuff is long in the tooth now and somewhat limited... it’s a shame they have decided to pull out of the market  and not bring their products upto date. Perhaps they felt they couldn’t really compete in the market.

Anyway I recommend setting up an ESSID in your house, using overlapping access point that are themselves wired back to an Ethernet switch. This should give an optimum high capacity wlan solution that allows your hosts to roam and rehome their access point connections to suit load balancing and signal requirements. It also encourages the access points to work at lower power reducing RFI, neighbouring interference, increasing signal quality/data throughput and extending host battery life... like iPads. 

I recommend the Ubiquiti range of access points... they are basic commercial grade, offer good performance and functionality, are affordable and are (relatively) easy to set up. Try and picture the setup of access points as inter locking or Olympic Rings. It is important to wire the access points as this will provide by far the best performance, functionality and versatility. You can power the access points via Ethernet, from a PoE switch or adapters thereby reducing the wires and clutter near the access point. If set up right your access points simply look like smoke alarms mounted high on hall wall or ceiling... quite innocuous 

you do want to avoid extending wirelessly access points, as that heavily compromises performance and functionality. There are newer mesh options, but in my opinion really only beneficial over very large spaces like large shops, stadiums, warehouses, very large houses etc ... here picture a chess board where the edge square mesh access points are wired and the internal squares are small micro access points that are only wireless. A mesh solution with very view wired access points becomes relatively in effective regarding throughput with load.  It does carry risk of the word ‘mesh’ being used in a consumer context without really understanding the pre requiste Ethernet wiring  requirements and conditions of effective meshing.

You tore the place apart, and didn’t run Ethernet cables? Tear it apart again!

Thanks Simon - will look in more details into the Ubiquiti products and what ESSID is ...

@ Chrissu: it is the remaining half of the house that needs tearing apart to manage a fully wired  network, based on my experience with the current half it ain’t happening any time soon...

Hi Greg, an ESSID is simply an Extended Service Set Identifier or Extended SSID .. which is  a WLAN  network with multiple cooperating access points sharing a common SSID.

Highly recommend ubiquiti products i have the ACP PRO access point to my existing Netgear router and turned off its wifi. Makes wifi work all the time. Looking to upgrade my router to one of theirs soon plus switch to power more AP'S with POE. 

DrPo posted:

Taking advantage of a living room and kitchen renovation I would like to check options to improve wifi coverage (unfortunately fully wired coverage remains a no-option despite having had the place practically torn apart for the renovation ).

Current set up: modem in study, Airport Express 1 (AP1) with as wi-fi "master" in study, AP2 in repeater mode in the living room near the NDX. Very stable up to 96/24. 

Evaluating an alternative set up: modem in Living Room (now possible due to new phone line socket there), wi-fi "router" in Living room (ensuring wired connection to NDX), repeaters (brand and type to be decided) in study and bedroom(s).

Given that Apple has announced that they will retire the wifi products like AE what solution would you recommend for setting up a solid wi-fi network in the house? I have read good things about Ubiquiti and "promising" things about mesh network solutions like Google wi-fi, however it looks that until a year ago there were some glitches (reading some posts of Phil on this forum). 

thanks in advance, Greg

 

 

I was very dissapointed Apple dropped the Airport/TC ranges and rushed to buy a 3TB Time Capsule - I now wish I'd got one years ago  - I'm getting significantly better wi-fif throughput than I did on the last generation Express even on an 'N' rated Mini with the Extreme/TCs allowing AC too.

I had ethernet cabling put in when I renovated the pace 2 years ago, and it's superb but you always seem to want more sockets available than you'd originally envisaged!  I'm typing on a Mac Mini on a 'breakfast bar' - why did I put all the ethernet on the other side of the room!  The TC has made a huge difference in speed when uploading to various NAS drives and I get 1GB/min to a large drive attached to the TC whichis pretty reasonable for wirless in my view even if better is available!

Not used any Ubiquiti access points but I use their basic ERLite-3 router in my office to split my FTTC ADSL to separate office/domestic networks (latter uses a Netgear switch to individual rooms outside the office)  which is amazing for the price (no wi-fi), and I'd be very tempted to try their access points in teh future:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/UBIQU...Router/dp/B00HXT8EKE