Can i get wireless-ac speeds all over the house?

oldskoo1

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Oct 3, 2014
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It has taken a while but i'm getting fibre install next month and i have the option of up to 150Mb speeds.

I live in a 3 storey detached house, the rooms are divided by block so wifi signals penetrate easier than solid brick but i still struggle with weak signals.

I currently have 1x 2.4ghz router on the ground floor. On the third floor i get about 39Mbps with an actual tested throughput of around 15-20Mbps. This clearly doesn't cut it. On the ground floor the mbp reports 145Mbps.

I have thought a lot about my options. I have a lot of apple gear, a few laptops, AC enabled, an AC iMac and a number of phones including an AC iPhone 6. I purchased an Asus RT-68U but even that struggled to provide more than 30-60Mbps when the laptops shared data on the top floor. So even though the 5ghz signal reached the to floor it was only marginally faster than my current router.


So now i'm left trying to figure out how i get reliable ac like fast speeds all over the house for wifi devices - we only have 1 desktop.

1) An airport express running 5ghz into a power line adapter (but my 500Mbps adapter is limited by the 100Mbps ethernet port) - have 1 of these on each floor

2) Airport extreme on ground floor with airport express repeating on 2 and 3. Airport express doesn't do wifi-ac and repeating halves the speed

3) Get someone in to try and install ethernet ports and cat6 all over the house so i can plug in wifi-ac access points on each floor. But a) i can't see many wifi-ac access points available and b) is this a good idea because doesn't it use 80mhz of bandwidth, do i have enough spectrum to ensure each of the base stations doesn't interfere with each other

4) Find a really powerful wifi-ac router than can do the entire house

5) Accept its very very hard over such a large area to get wifi speeds faster than 15MB-20MB/sec. So should i except this and just stick with power line adapters (my 500Mbps ones connect at around 138Mbps) and accept the 100Mbps port limit and run airport expresses on each floor and accept over wifi i'm limited to 9MB/Sec - 11MB/Sec, loosing out on my 150Mbps broadband top speed.

thanks guys
 
If you use more than 2 powerline devices they will compete for bandwidth and you will get less total throughput than if you only had 2.

802.11ac is suppose to have better coverage because of beam forming but so far I have seen very little evidence this feature does anything at all to solve the issue of walls absorbing the signals when you talk to people using it the real world.

Your best bet is always cabled connection to AP. You do not need special AP you can use any router as a AP. Some have special AP modes they can run but all you basically do is disable the DHCP and use the lan ports to connect them. I guess the only feature a true AP has that few routers have is many are designed to run on PoE. As you mention 802.11ac does use 80mhz. There are 2 blocks that size...there are more but almost no routers support using the channels you have to detect weather radar so they just do not support those channels at all. What you could do is say run the top and bottom floor on the low block and the middle flow on the top block. If you still would get interference you could reduce the transmit power of the radios.

Using AP using cabled connection is the industry standard for enterprise installations. Still I don't know what will happen with 802.11ac. Because business pack peoples desks on top of each other and the density of devices is so high it is hard to get a good balance of users per AP using 20mhz channels. So far most large installs do not use more than 20mhz per AP.

In your house it won't be a issue other than competing with your neighbors you should be able to use the 2 80mhz blocks well. Now when the new 802.11ac wave 2 comes out that can use 160mhz then there is no solution.

When you look at your speed issue you have to consider would you really use 150m on a single machine. Pretty much the only people that can do this are running torrent. If a combination of machines on the floors can get the 150m then it doesn't really matter since even if each could get 200m they still have to share the 150m.

 

oldskoo1

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Oct 3, 2014
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Thank you for this comprehensive answer

I took your advice and worked this weekend to get a cable fixed up so I can link my devices together.

I moved my modem up to the middle floor, cabled my access point up (I bought an AirPort Extreme) now I have excellent speeds all over the house. The airport extreme certainly helped and moving the access point to a central point also helped.

Unfortunately I only have wireless devices on the same floor but speeds on a floor above are excellent at 40MB/sec or more lan and a hard link to my modem.

Testing speeds at the opposite ends of the house are also excellent. 25-30MB/sec in some cases although I saw this drop introducing N only devices so I've separated off the bands and ssid

Before I got your answer I tried an asus DSL-AC68U but unfortunately returned it. Whilst excellent on paper I found its vdsl stability and sync poor. I also got better speeds at range with the airport express however this is unfair as it was not tested in the same spot.

Overall very happy with the result of recabling and getting a decent AC access point. The asus perhaps would be better but it ran hot and the AE is barely cool. Very easy to setup with my apple gear.

Can't complain when my lowest speed seems to be 250-300mbps which gets me my 150mbps downlink max.

But your right thinking about it its highly unlikely 1 client will need this. The new placement also enables me to run cat6 straight up to the office.

In summary for ultimate speed and coverage placement and cable links do produce the best results. Seperate newer and older clients too.