Expanding wifi Internet

[ckucia]

We live in a doublewide manufactured home. Have a 36x48 garage/barn about 10 ft away from the short side wall.

Currently have DSL with a combined router/wap that came with the service 7 years ago.

I just got a job telecommuting. Going to build an office shed about 20' away from the house in the back yard. Planning on upgrading the DSL service and getting a second phone line.

Right now wireless Internet works. The WAP is on the end of the house near the garage. Service is so-so on the other side of the house but I get service in the garage.

We don't have cell service, so my cell service works over our wifi network.

So what I'm looking to do is put the router, probably a POE switch and a distribution block in the garage. Have phone with both lines in the house, garage and office. Run cat6 from the garage to the house and the garage to the shed. Put a WAP in the garage, one in the shed and probably two in the house.

I actually do IT for a living, although I haven't gotten in the weeds with wireless, but what I would spec to cover a similar commercial environment is probably going to be overkill. I'm also not familiar at all with consumer-level products.

My main concern is conflict between WAPs that are too close without having some sort of mesh/controller-based system. I don't necessarily need to be able to seamlessly move from WAP to WAP and have seamless switching (although it would be nice). I mostly don't want to have a laptop between WAPs and have it be unreliable or have a cell-over-wireless conversation interrupted when walking through the house.

I think the shed will be far enough away that it will be a wireless island. The garage maybe/maybe not depending on where I locate the access point. Main concern is wonkiness in the house between two WAPs. I could probably set all the WAPs up with separate channels, but that seems a bit crude.
Seems like I shouldnl't be the first person to have this need.

Looking for some decent vendors and experiences if you've been down a similar road.

 

[jdm5]

I'd suggest looking into Ubiquiti products; pretty reasonable prices for (low end) commercial products. Central management of your WAPs with their controller software. Just be careful as (like everything else here) it can be a rabbit hole...end up with a whole bunch of managed POE switches with fiber interconnects!

 

[ckucia]

I've used Ubiquiti in the past. Nice equipment. Good idea looking at the low-end commercial stuff - probably better solution than the consumer side.

 

[ScaldedDog]

Agreed on Ubiquiti. You sound like a good candidate for a UDM plus some other APs. I have the UDM Pro and am quite happy with it.

Where in WV are you? I grew up in Cross Lanes, outside Charleston, though I've been in CO since the early '80s.

Mark

 

[ckucia]

We're in Spencer/Reedy area in Roane Cty. Definitely God's country, especially this time of year.

 

[ScaldedDog]

Nice! My dad grew up in Left Hand.

Mark

Sent from my SM-G986U using Tapatalk

 

[Vintage Veloce]

Thank goodness you are running wires... so many just try to do some wifi extender or mesh thing and have it fail.

Be sure to buy devices that let you adjust the power level. Certainly in a small space like the garage you can turn it down a bit and that should solve any conflict issues.

Use some wifi analyzer software and look to see if you can see any neighbor networks and what frequencies they are using. That may also help you avoid any conflicts. If you don't have any neighbors you should have trouble arranging your frequencies.
If you use android, check out "SmartWiFiSelector", it is an app that makes sure you are on the best available nework as you move around. It's awesome.

On routers/waps, the Synology is probably the best consumer grade device you can get. I love it. The software is very sophisticated.

 

[Keep]

Its 20 feet. 1 Ubiquiti LR-AP and you are all set.

Access Point WiFi 6 Long-Range

U6-LR is a high-performance Access Point leveraging advanced WiFi 6 technology to provide powerful wireless coverage to enterprise environments. It delivers an aggregate radio rate of up to 3.0 Gbps with 5 GHz (4x4 MU-MIMO and OFDMA) and 2.4 GHz 4x4 MIMO radios. The U6-LR seamlessly blends into...

store.ui.com

KISS, do not make things complicated. If you can run wires, bury a 1 inch black plastic irrigation pipe and run 2 lines, because you know one will fail.

I use Ubiquiti in the enterprise all the time, great gear and cheap enough you can use buy spares to have on hand in the rare event things break.

 

[boatshoes]

I would use a couple UAP-AC-Lites (maybe 1 per building), turn the power down as low as you need to avoid them shouting over each other. Turn off auto channels and auto signal strength. Stagger your channels between adjacent APs.
While it's tempting to use a single powerful AP like a UAP-AC-LR, all your devices which are not high-powered have to share airtime when they transmit, and the weaker ones will drag your overall latency down when they are far away. You're much better off with a nearby AP on lower power.

 

[dwasifar]

I would also recommend Ubiquiti UniFi access points, with two caveats: 1) Configuring and maintaining them requires controller software running on some machine on your network, and 2) They stop receiving security updates when Ubiquiti decides they're EOL. This means you are not only stuck at a certain firmware level with EOL hardware, but you'll also eventually be stuck at a certain controller version level because the newer versions of the controller won't manage the EOL hardware.

So there is a certain amount of vendor lock-in with Ubiquiti, and not all their users are happy about this. But it's good hardware at excellent prices.

 

[boatshoes]

I would also recommend Ubiquiti UniFi access points, with two caveats: 1) Configuring and maintaining them requires controller software running on some machine on your network, and 2) They stop receiving security updates when Ubiquiti decides they're EOL. This means you are not only stuck at a certain firmware level with EOL hardware, but you'll also eventually be stuck at a certain controller version level because the newer versions of the controller won't manage the EOL hardware.

So there is a certain amount of vendor lock-in with Ubiquiti, and not all their users are happy about this. But it's good hardware at excellent prices.

Well, he could set them up without a controller (standalone) and configure them and update their firmware directly from the phone app. You don't need the controller running 24/7 unless you're running a guest portal or something. In the absence of an active controller, they will continue to run with their last configuration. You could also choose to only launch the controller if you wanted to update them or change the configuration.

I think all vendors are subject to the "no more updates when we don't want to update them anymore" policy though, that's just typical unless you're doing dd-wrt or some other open-source system.

 

[dwasifar]

Well, he could set them up without a controller (standalone) and configure them and update their firmware directly from the phone app. You don't need the controller running 24/7 unless you're running a guest portal or something. In the absence of an active controller, they will continue to run with their last configuration. You could also choose to only launch the controller if you wanted to update them or change the configuration.

I didn't realize there was a phone app for it now. And it's true you don't need the controller running when you're not actively configuring or maintaining them. I just wanted to point out that they're not like typical consumer networking products in that they don't have their own built-in configuration interface.

 

[kj_mustang]

The Ubiquiti phone app only does a simple config per device. You can not set up guest networks and don't know if you could give multiple APs the same Broadcast/network name and have users flow easily from each one.

 

[ddurrett896]

Google Wifi

 

[boatshoes]

I just wanted to point out that they're not like typical consumer networking products in that they don't have their own built-in configuration interface.

Agreed! Although if I can figure the controller out, OP with his IT background should be fine. What I love about Ubiquiti is the stability. My inlaws have an AP running standalone and I never get called about it.

The Ubiquiti phone app only does a simple config per device. You can not set up guest networks and don't know if you could give multiple APs the same Broadcast/network name and have users flow easily from each one.

You can do multiple SSID for 5 and 2.4, but agreed the setup is limited. My home controller runs all the time but office controller stays offline except for updates. "Guest policy" SSID (not the same as a VLAN) needs a controller to configure but will run fine without an active controller.

A heads up that the auto-strength settings for APs that are in a controller aren't well-managed. You should take the time to manually set channels and strengths for each AP.
Flowing between APs easily is largely down to the client device settings, some are clingier than others. The controller can force a reconnect on slow devices, but that's not the same as fast roaming. Fast roaming/meshing/flowing doesn't appear to be a requirement for the OP's use case.

 

[dwasifar]

Agreed! Although if I can figure the controller out, OP with his IT background should be fine. What I love about Ubiquiti is the stability. My inlaws have an AP running standalone and I never get called about it.

My experience with them is that they're stable until you update. Then you're rolling the bones. Every time I've had a problem with a UAP, it's been a failed update.

 

[Denwood]

Given your use case, (running CAT6 to the building), just grab a TPLINK RE650 and set it up as an access point. It has a gigabit port which you can run from your POE switch in the shed. I use Ubiquiti WIFI for commercial, only for ease of management...it makes zero sense for home use. I would absolutely recommend the Ubiquiti Nanobeam AC Gen2 for line of site wireless bridges (cheap and rock solid reliable) but you don't need them. The TPLinks are inexpensive, and reliable for home use. AC2600 wireless speeds on the RE650 will saturate your DSL with no issues.

If you also set up one in your house, just set them to the same SIDs and call it done. Despite all the manufacturers claims, most devices don't roam gracefully anyway, regardless of hardware. That includes Ubiquiti...and I manage a few networks (about a dozen sites) using them. I've had to turn off many of the "advanced" features of the Ubiquiti networks due to hardware issues with various brands of client devices/chipsets.