Complicated Residential Wi-Fi Design - Need Help!

[gregkinney]

I am trying to design a home wi-fi layout and have a bit of a complicated situation and need help. Here are my complications:

1) It's a long and skinny three story house with a choppy floorplan - a few rooms with 3 external walls.

2) I am on rural Internet. It is a line-of-sight antenna that points to my ISP who leases bandwidth from a larger company. I get 12mbps/3mbps which is doable, but borderline for my needs, hence my need to optimize this as perfect as possible.

3) I'm a bit of a tech junkie with lots of smart home items and phones/tablets/blu-ray players/etc. connected to the network.

The good news - I have multiple cat5e drops in every room of the house and budget isn't too much of a concern - although I would like to do this myself, so a commercial application that I would have to hire out isn't something I would lean toward.

I have an Airport Extreme as the router and 4 Expresses serving as AP's. I hard-wired in everything and set it up as a roaming network. I'm having trouble passing from AP to AP. Sometimes it passes great, sometimes its slow enough to drop what it is I am doing, and sometimes it sticks with the worse signal. I know design is so critical and was wondering if some better options existed. I was wondering if there was better equipment like Ubiquiti that I should be using? Or if I should get rid of the Expresses and put 1 or 2 more Extreme's to serve as AP's and try to simplify things? Your help please!

 

[BuddhaSkoota]

I have an Airport Extreme as the router and 4 Expresses serving as AP's. I hard-wired in everything and set it up as a roaming network. I'm having trouble passing from AP to AP. Sometimes it passes great, sometimes its slow enough to drop what it is I am doing, and sometimes it sticks with the worse signal. I know design is so critical and was wondering if some better options existed. I was wondering if there was better equipment like Ubiquiti that I should be using? Or if I should get rid of the Expresses and put 1 or 2 more Extreme's to serve as AP's and try to simplify things? Your help please!

Residential access points do not feature AP handoff. For that you'll need an enterprise-class device like Ubiquiti's Unifi APs or similar.
https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/

You should be able to continue using the Extreme as your router, but using its wireless will affect roaming of devices that are connected to it. You may want to consider disabling the wifi on this router.

Keeping all APs on the same subnet is important, but shouldn't be an issue with your network configuration.

Without knowing the exact architecture of your home, it would be hard to tell how many APs you may need. Possibly a minimum one for each floor.

 

[gregkinney]

I have an Airport Extreme as the router and 4 Expresses serving as AP's. I hard-wired in everything and set it up as a roaming network. I'm having trouble passing from AP to AP. Sometimes it passes great, sometimes its slow enough to drop what it is I am doing, and sometimes it sticks with the worse signal. I know design is so critical and was wondering if some better options existed. I was wondering if there was better equipment like Ubiquiti that I should be using? Or if I should get rid of the Expresses and put 1 or 2 more Extreme's to serve as AP's and try to simplify things? Your help please!

Residential access points do not feature AP handoff. For that you'll need an enterprise-class device like Ubiquiti's Unifi APs or similar.
https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/

You should be able to continue using the Extreme as your router, but using its wireless will affect roaming of devices that are connected to it. You may want to consider disabling the wifi on this router.

Keeping all APs on the same subnet is important, but shouldn't be an issue with your network configuration.

Without knowing the exact architecture of your home, it would be hard to tell how many APs you may need. Possibly a minimum one for each floor.

Yes, I understand the floorplan is something that can't be done theoretically, I have and will continue to use Wifi Analyzer to pick the best spots for the equipment. Thank you so much! Your information is exactly what I was looking for. I had seen others raving about the Ubiquiti AP's but I didn't understand what the difference was, and it sounds like this will fix my problem. I will pick a couple up and start plugging away.