Wi-Fi in 6500 Square foot home

[s44]

Spoke with my LV guy and he stated the buffalo products are solid and fast.

I don't know why you keep repeating this. If you're going to use consumer stuff there are better options (Asus routers, Unifi APs) and if you're going to go fully cost-is-no-object enterprise then Buffalo isn't a player.

 

[gscone]

Decided to use the mesh system, I think its ubitqu of whatever its called. Will post feedback once everything is installed and working..

 

[alkemyst]

Just make sure you are using plenum rated wiring if you are going to run it through conduit.

This is simply not true and in fact totally wrong.

If you are running through a conduit, plenum rating is irrelevant.

It's only matters if going into open air/plenum spaces.

 

[alkemyst]

BTW, I asked my local city department and they said there was no regulation for low power stuff like Ethernet in residential homes (unless I ran it through air ducts). I specifically asked because I didn't want to screw up my inspection. (I had pulled all the proper permits for my reno, unlike most people.)

Also true...many 'business' requirements are not needed for residential ones.

 

[alkemyst]

Decided to use the mesh system, I think its ubitqu of whatever its called. Will post feedback once everything is installed and working..

Mesh systems are great when you have a need. Keep in mind every hand off is going to be a reduction of 50% of your total speed. Around 4 hops is considered max for real traffic and even then good luck with video.

Seemless roaming is a topic that comes up a lot, IMHO in a residential environment without wireless voice it's cannon fodder and battle that gives up too much otherwise.

If I had too I'd bite the bullet and run some ethernet out from my home run to autonomous access points and just plug them into the wall if PoE was a waste.

The most retarded thing I have seen (and it's happening more and more) is people are buying PoE injectors that must be plugged in to begin with and only do 100Mbps, when their switch can do 1000Mbps and they have access points that have power adapters.

 

[azazel1024]

This is simply not true and in fact totally wrong.

If you are running through a conduit, plenum rating is irrelevant.

It's only matters if going into open air/plenum spaces.

Sorry, I am thinking of the air ducts. Not regular wiring conduit. Misspoke.

 

[kevnich2]

The most retarded thing I have seen (and it's happening more and more) is people are buying PoE injectors that must be plugged in to begin with and only do 100Mbps, when their switch can do 1000Mbps and they have access points that have power adapters.

I don't agree with this statement at all. Most AP's right now, minus the AC which aren't even really solid yet, won't use anything more than 100mb/s anyway, regardless of whether it has 100mb port or gig port. Secondly, running POE is ALOT easier and less cumbersome than trying to locate an AP next to a power jack just so it has power.

If a WAP has POE capabilities and includes all necessary hardware for POE and you didn't use it, you'd never be hired back on any of my jobs. POE makes the install much cleaner as there are no visible wires and the AP can be located anywhere you can run an ethernet cable.

As far as the AC AP's, I know the ubiquiti also comes with gigabit capable POE injectors with the AP so that's also a mute point.

 

[kevnich2]

Decided to use the mesh system, I think its ubitqu of whatever its called. Will post feedback once everything is installed and working..

I would recommend against trying to run an AP without a wired uplink. Ubiquiti is capable of it, but speed is reduced. Considering these come with all necessary POE hardware with the units, run some ethernet cables in your ceiling to a few key areas: Absolute middle of the house on each floor and then to far out remote areas if you have a very large house. One AP should be enough to cover a floor as long as it doesn't exceed about 2,300 sq feet and no large obstructions.

 

[azazel1024]

I don't agree with this statement at all. Most AP's right now, minus the AC which aren't even really solid yet, won't use anything more than 100mb/s anyway, regardless of whether it has 100mb port or gig port. Secondly, running POE is ALOT easier and less cumbersome than trying to locate an AP next to a power jack just so it has power.

If a WAP has POE capabilities and includes all necessary hardware for POE and you didn't use it, you'd never be hired back on any of my jobs. POE makes the install much cleaner as there are no visible wires and the AP can be located anywhere you can run an ethernet cable.

As far as the AC AP's, I know the ubiquiti also comes with gigabit capable POE injectors with the AP so that's also a mute point.

Very much not true. Oh, it might be true if you are talking about a phone, but most laptops are easily capable of breaking the 100Mbps barrier, even on 11n. My Netgear 3500L is capable of 180Mbps to my laptop and its only a 300Mbps router.

10/100 ports are only a "good idea" if you know you won't be hitting those speeds or if for some reason you NEED a really cheap router. Otherwise its likely to constrain your wireless speeds, especially if you go one further and connect the access points with 10/100 ports back to a router/access point or switch with only 10/100 ports too. Then the entirety of your backbone is limited to around 11.5MB/sec. At least if you connect each one back to a gigabit capable router/access point/switch your limit is 100Mbps per access point.

Basically if it is anything "better" than an N150 router/access point, having only 10/100 ports is likely to limit the maximum wireless speed you can see from it, unless all of your clients are very limited as well.

A wireless mesh network is a bad idea unless you don't care about throughput. First, you halve wireless speeds for every hop. Second, you have to operate all of them on the same channel. If you go wired, you have no reduction from wireless hops AND you can spread channel it. So if you have a setup like this

A --------- B -------- C

With the APs on opposite ends of the house and one in the middle, or one on each floor for top floor, main level and basement, you can operate each one on a different channel and have no channel overlaps. Or if they are widely seperated enough, you could have the two furthest access points running 40MHz on the same channels and the middle one on 20MHz on a different channel or vice versa and not have anything stepping on anything else.

With my setup I have an outdoor AP hanging off the edge of my garage, my router in my basement at the opposite end of my house from the garage AP, and a playroom/living room AP roughly centrally located between the two. Positioning myself centrally, the playroom AP is around -30dBi with the garage/outdoor AP at -72dBi and the basement router at -78dBi. If I go outside vaguely near that outdoor/garage AP, I have -40dBi or so on it and -86dBi on my basement router. Go in to my basement and my basement router is around -30 to 45dBi, but the outdoor/garage AP is around -80 to -90dBi.

So there isn't really any cochannel interference between the signal strength differences are so dramatically high between the outdoor/garage AP and the basement AP. I run my playroom AP at 40MHz and channel 2+6 (long story, but in short my tablet can't handle 40MHz on 1+5 for some reason, but it works a treat on 2+6) and my basement router and outdoor AP on channel 11. No co-channel interference. I've tested it running my laptop at full tilt in my playroom and my tablet outside and in the basement nearish their respective wireless access points and I hit around 20-21MB/sec in the living room and around 6MB/sec in the basement/outdoors, which cooresponds to the maximum speed of both devices on 40 and 20MHz respectively. I can also run both devices on the basement and outdoor APs in the same testing, and no slow down compared to running just one device.

I'd run the two distill APs on 40MHz and the playroom on 20MHz...but I typically have the need for speed around my kitchen/dinning room (and homework table) and playroom more than I do in the basement, or the bedrooms which are directly over the basement router, or outside. This is all on 2.4GHz BTW (switching from N300 2.4GHz router and APs to AC1200-1750 when I can. Hopefully in just a couple of months).

Anyway, if I was meshing it, the BEST I could possibly get is 40MHz performance, for a single device. If I ended up running two devices at once, it isn't just that THEY would be sharing bandwidth, but all of it gets cut down if the devices are connected through different APs.

So what might have been, call it, 150 or so Mbps of realizable/usable wireless bandwidth with one device, suddenly becomes roughly halved because you are meshing it (assuming just one hop) and then split between the two devices. If you have a second meshed AP running, now you have the initial bandwidth quartered and then shared between 3 devices...or roughly 1/12th the original bandwidth.

Not what you want, I think, with a large house and lots of people.

If you have it all wired, especially seperate channels, the above scenario, where you would have had 3 users on 3 seperate APs...you very well might not be sharing ANY wireless bandwidth. So instead of possibly each user getting 1/12th of the original, you have all 3 users getting the original bandwidth. Or at least 1 or 2 users getting full 40MHz bandwidth and 1 user getting 20MHz bandwidth.