Home router suggestions

[Michael Chaney]

I have a confession to make - I haven't been paying attention to wifi in the last 15 years.  I typically wait until it's too slow then go buy what seems like the high end of whatever netgear is on sale at best buy.  That has served me well for some years now.  I now have a netgear R8500.  I don't remember how old it is but it's somewhat recent.

My house is a rectangle that is 34' front to back and 76' side to side.  It's basically a ranch home with a bonus area upstairs and a full basement below.  The exact geographic center of the house is in a hallway, but there's a coat closet just a few feet away from it.  I have my cable modem and wireless router mounted in the closet near the top of the closet.

My office is in the corner of the basement as far from the router as I can be - not because I want to be far away but because this is the perfect office space.  My wifi mostly works, but with the kids home from university over the break I find my computer getting kicked off wifi a few times each day.  When that happens it generally won't find the router automatically again so I have to enter the ssid and password again.  When connected I get full signal strength.

Looking now, there are 18 wireless devices connected to the wifi and another one or two that are probably just turned off.  When my other kid is home there are two or three more devices connected to the wifi.  I've noticed that when he's here I get kicked off more often.  The router also loses its wifi ability every couple of weeks when the kids are both here causing me to have to reboot it to gain access again.

What are my options if I want better coverage on all three levels of the house and all corners of the basement?

It seems I likely need a couple of routers that play nice with each other.  I don't want to get some sort of repeater that will simply halve my bandwidth and rebroadcast packets up the line.  I have a second wiring closet upstairs with a switch and cat6 running to it.  I plan on adding another such setup in the basement.  The point is that if I have multiple wireless routers I'd prefer to be able to run cat6 to all of them so that the packets never hit more than a single wireless router before going on the wire.

Suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,

Michael

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Michael Darrin Chaney, Sr.
mdch...@michaelchaney.com
http://www.michaelchaney.com/

[Gibson Prichard]

I have an older home with a basement and two floors above that I cover with two routers, both acting as access points, connected via Ethernet to a PFSense firewall in my basement. 

When my four kids are home from college, we can easily have 25 IP-enabled devices once you consider phones, smart speakers, desktops, laptops, and TVs. All of our things work just fine with the two access points. 

I would think that if you could connect a router via wire (configured as an access point) to the existing router you have and place the new unit in the basement, you would likely remedy your situation. With the additional unit just running as a wireless radio (with the routing & DHCP disabled), you still have all devices on one network, so media browsing and printer access and any file shares you have will all work. 

Just let one unit perform the NAT/Gateway & DHCP role for your network and configure both wireless radios on the same SSID with the same password, so devices can roam between the access points seamlessly. 

Gibson

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Gibson Prichard

Nashville, TN

gib...@prichard.tv

615-948-4609

[Josh Lefler]

I have gone to a completely unifi setup. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it lets you manage as many switches, access points, etc. as you want from one controller interface. My current setup consists of one UDM Pro, 6 access points of various types, and a few of their switches. It is absolutely overkill for my house, but I have rock solid 5 Ghz wifi in every square inch of every room in a pretty crowded RF environment.  All of the access points are powered by PoE so it looks pretty clean. It is expensive, but it's worth considering if you enjoy tinkering with networking stuff. I will say that it is an all or nothing proposition. You only get the benefit of the "single pane of glass" and automatic cooperation between the various components if everything is Unifi. As soon as you add a non-unifi switch, you start seeing anomalies because Unifi doesn't know how to handle it. 

I should note that unifi made news today because of a security breach on their corporate side. I think most (if not all) of the major networking players have had breaches so I'm not sure that changes anything, but FYI. 

Josh. 

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[Brian H. Ward]

I also went w/ Ubiquity/Unifi, but not quite as over-the-top as Josh. I have two access points (UDM Pro) at the north and south ends of the house on the first floor. That gets me solid coverage on the second floor and the basement (as well as the first floor). They are powered (and connected) via Netgear 8-port POE switch that I picked up on Amazon. I added the Unifi controller software, but I'm running it on a RPi4 (it's a java app, running on openjdk-8), so I'm not using any other (than the APs) Unifi hardware. I still have my cable-modem acting as the nat gateway/router, currently -- plans exist to replace that modem and dual home the RPi so it can act as router/firewall for the house.

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"Humanity will not be free until the last stone of the last church falls on the head of last priest" -- The Emperor of Mankind, Warhammer 40,000

[Brian H. Ward]

My access points are UAP-AC-Pro (after consulting the dashboard)

[Tilghman Lesher]

I'll add my voice to the Unifi/Ubiquiti ranks. I have two UAP-AC-Pro
devices that I use on extreme opposite ends of the house, but the main
unit is a UAP-AC-Lite, which is likely sufficient for each zone. I
really like that that central controller unifies the configuration of
all devices. I can even turn off or on specific SSIDs on specific
devices.

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Tilghman

[Michael Chaney]

Thanks, guys, I really appreciate these responses.  Looks like I'll have to get a POE switch and put some pucks around the house.

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[Csaba Toth]

In my case it wasn't the range but rather the fact that sometimes 20 devices are fine with the access point but one is picky. I have all kinds of smart devices (IoT a.k.a. Internet of hackable/hacked Things like smart scale, CO sensor, temperature sensor, cameras) tablets, phones, laptops. The picky one was my wife's university issued laptop, it runs Windows managed by IT so I couldn't mess with it but she had unbearable 2-3Mbps speed sitting ~3 yards from the access point. During COVID she teaches online so I had to solve that. I ended up buying a UTP cable and I wired it to her desk. Although the direct distance is 3 yards, I did it nice leading it up to the ceiling, it requires several turns, over two walkways, so ended up using a 50ft cable. But there's nothing better than a UTP cable.

So my advice is if your office is an outlier in the basement and nothing else has problem, wire a 100ft (or however long) UTP or STP cable to there and I guarantee you it'll be such a relief!

My problem now is that my AP (I need only one, small apt) is an aging Linksys WRT3200 ACM with OpenWRT/LEDE firmware. I bought it used many years ago and I was flashing it bi-weekly with fortified firmware by Davidc502 https://dc502wrt.org/.

I had some run ins in 2019 when the bandwidth degraded and I had to roll back (although thinking back the biggest complaint was my wife's laptop at that time as well), then I got more cautious. Then there were some breaking changes in OpenWRT which I didn't risk during the pandemic). I still think the fortification is way better than most of the factory firmware. However I don't want to be stuck forever and the AP could also give up, so I wonder what AP should I buy which is the best for open firmware like OpenWRT/LEDE or similar.

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[Paul Boniol]

Unifi looks good, but I wasn't necessarily wanting to go mesh. I had a similar problem (when more devices get on, something would get booted, some areas of the home had low coverage). I got a Netgear Nighthawk RAX48 when BestBuy had a sale and have not had problems since.

I've been on a Facebook group for cord cutters. Several have TP Link devices. I've tried to point out this may not be a great company to choose for your wifi, but I get drowned out. (It is a group where the exact same questions get asked multiple times a week, so I've largely stopped looking at their posts. Plus the ones that say "chord" are annoying...) 

Paul

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