So I have a task starting today: see what the best setups for wireless connections you can get for a budget, things that I need to go after first of what I'm looking for/need help with: Budget: $375 Current setup: one of these supports the entire area RT-N66U | Networking | ASUS USA Ideas: Taking the current router and using it and adding access points via Ubiquiti amplifi (here: AmpliFi Wi-Fi ) is one such option that I currently have, or just one of these UniFi AC LR - UniFi - Ubiquiti Networks Store There are other options too, any ideas for what I should get/best option for me right now? thanks
Probably a small Xclaim XO1 (Baby Ruckus) would be the best for the budget. Without knowing more about the coverage, band used, application, client number its hard to be more precise since wifi is quite a physics bitch Throwing down repeaters help for a balcony or small garden but have alot of downsides when you want more.
Small house, 3 floors, there's about 4 people, but each person would have about ~2 devices for wi-fi per person, any ideas? I forget the area of the house though
Well usually we make measurements at the site since floors, which material, how thick, that all plays a role with wifi I'd probably just make sure you have a dual band router with okayish antennas (5ghz for device density and 2,4ghz for range). On open space we had good results with the AP AC Lite. Around 70m range @2.4ghz which is okay for builtin antenna. A cheaper but more ugly solution (and single band) could be a bullet with fitting antenna. (Id choose 2.4 ghz for range in this case and hope you dont want high speed wifi for downloading and gaming but instead wire for this )
Ok, thanks, since this is a house that has mostly brick & wood foundations, I assume material is not much of an issue, the other thing is that the wi-fi would have to be at least good enough to handle some gaming as well as varying levels of being connected to a remote VM as using remote servers on a work laptop happens often, so... I would want a dual band, (moderate) antenna, near the center of the house? considering it's (I now have the specs for this lol) 2700 ft^2. The issue I have with wiring up the house with LAN ports by the way is that current router location/the current room with the best location for the router is far away from the location that I would be using any devices with Wi-Fi, almost exactly the other side of the house, so, with this information, should I just get a single router (multi-band, moderately fast (somewhere in the 1-2 gbp/s range), or go a multi-small range router setup so that there isn't much signal loss via going through walls & stuff, thanks for the help btw
I think a single good router would be best here. Extenders have the problem of latency and throughput is roughly halfed. Multi Access points would need a roaming function on different channels which I wouldnt tell end user to make since without proper field limiting you can have these bad spots where the device constantly flips btw. the APs. Remote services to a VM are no issue at least with good common technics like teamviewer or mstsc since they all use tcp and not much bandwidth. Gaming is more a problem, you want to have a strong signal here. But the problem is usually not the APs part. Thats usually something with dedicated antenna arrays. What most people overlook is the client, esp. mobiles which maybe have a 2cm long antenna inside. So beefing up the client can help alot too. Alfa networks has some nice cheap adapters and also directional antennas (maybe this is all you need in addition to the router you already have) And as long as you dont oversature the 2.4 GHz band i'd prefer this one (because better range=signal strength) but its very limited device and bandwidth wise. So if someone is constantly download on that channel, you dont want to game on it too Thats where 5 GHz is much stronger but the higher the frequency, the faster it drops off due to range.
thanks, been looking to upgrade the home router, so I'll keep this information in mind as I look around on amazon and the like, and gaming shouldn't be much of a problem, as if I am gaming generally not much else is using the internet (maybe youtube, a little bit of mostly text websites) going on in the background, so I don't think 2.4 GHz band usage won't be much of a problem, but yhea, thank you for your advice (edit): forgot to mention the main issue: currently I have a lot of other people a round me, and because of this a lot of signal overlap happens, and having the other people changing their side so there is less signal overlap is not going to happen, any ideas for an easy way to be able to get around this?
You could survey the site first with a mobile app like wifi analyzer to check which bands are the worst on 2.4. And then choose the one that has the smallest amount of usage and overlaps. Beyond that theres nothing else you can do (beside boosting the clients as said or using more power that you are legally allowed ) or switch to 5 GHz which has WAY more "space" (and thus speed) but also shorter range again If you have a stationary PC you could even go overkill and use a bullet as receiver We did that a few years ago for someone who had to "reach a public wifi spot far away" with good success But I think a small alfa even with omni antenna will be a big improvement (When i make measurements of our public wifi spots i still have a good connection on the alfa where all mobiles already dont even see the ssid anymore)
heres a vid from linustechtips i would recomend looking through there vids adn watching some of them as well
I dont think that supposing a 900€ analysis solution on a 375$ budget is a good idea Btw. we tested the Wi-Spy DBx and found it not beeing really much better than the "free" ubnt AirView. And for the real professional analytics we use gps backed Ekahau (software 3500€+ alone) anyway... which well, is even more expensive. But works well for the campus size free wifi networks we install in cities. For end users, the free wifi analyzer for mobiles is usually enough.
It's a 3 floor, hard to modify house that I'd perfer to continue to live in while the network is reworked as to not spend huge amounts of money, does that make any sense to you?
this might give you some ideas and you could also try google hub maybe unless you wanna keep your current hardwear or something
The best setup for a router would be to get any router which you think will do a good job but for relatively low a cost, buy some CAT5 if you dont already have some and get two AV Ethernet adapters at around 2000mbps, plug all that in and itll give you roughly 80 avg down 35 avg up, its what i use. It's a simple solution to problematic wired networks as long as you have a socket nearby your computer but I wouldnt recommend plugging it into an extension lead as it slows down the internet.
