Question Help Arranging AP

[papb2020]

I have an 1800 sqft house that is awful for wifi. It has a central stone chimney and 90% of the walls are sheetrock + 3/4" beadboard wood paneling. All wifi killers. I currently have the main router (Netgear r6700v3) situated in the center of the house. Per wifes orders, its in a closet (I know, terrible). Off to one end of the house, where the kitchen is and the wifi is pretty weak, I have a netgear ex6100v2 extender set up. It is in bridge mode, hardwired back to the main router, and broadcasting an identical network. My 2.4 ghz is crowded with smart devices so my goal is to have the house well covered for 5ghz.

Now, in the kitchen, using inssider, I get about 70-80 dBm on the main router and 40-50 dBm on the extender. For some reason, my surface pro opts for the main router, which can sustain a strong signal. The network adapter is set to aggressively roam. As well, I have reduced the main router to 25% and tried to focus its broadcast to the other side of the house.

1) What is the best approach for determining optimal power output and placement of the routers? Is it no overlap and just walk around measuring dBm?

2) why is my surface choosing the weaker signal? My iphone chooses the extender 5ghz in the same location as the surface. Is it because the extender has a lower max speed on the 5ghz freq than the main router?

At some point I will probably purchase some unifi lite as suggested to me in another thread, but for now, I would like to work with the hardware I have.

Any tips/recommendations?

 

[RealBeast]

The bottom line is that devices are not very smart about their radio choice. Until 802.11 k,r,and v are in all consumer routers and APs roaming will not be very good.

I would suggest that you use distinct SSIDs with the same passkey so you can control which radio you connect to.

 

[bill001g]

I would agree with the above you the person are much smarter than any wifi system can be about will give you the best performance and what you should be connecting to.

I am not real sure why so many people get hung up on so called "seamless roaming". Its not like you are driving your car and you have to constantly change the tower you are connecting to like mobile cell data. How often would you have to manually change the wifi in a day on any particular device. Are there that many people actually watching netflix while they walk around there house. Maybe I am just too old where I don't see the need to actually use my data devices during the time I am walking between rooms.

 

[papb2020]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

Its less a problem of seamless roaming and more so that some days, the central AP is just strong enough that my PC will opt to connect to it instead of the closer AP with the same SSID that is moving much quicker. The best option for now appears to be to using distinct SSID.

For the next upgrade I am considering two options;

Option A: One central AP in the upstairs hall way hardwired back to my Netgear R6700v3. I run the risk that the centrally located stone chimney will still result in dead spots.

or

Option B: Two AP hardwired back to my r6700v3. One will be downstairs in the northern most room. The other will be upstairs in the southern most room. Drawbacks: what hardware to use and optimizing signal strength to avoid overlap/interfence.


Do you recommend A over B? I figure I should test A out by placing the current R6700 there and see how it performs.


What hardware would you recommend in each option? I like the idea of the unifi nanoHD for option A or two of the unifi in-wall HD for option B. Do these choices make sense? Also, would it make sense to wait for the Wifi 6 devices to come back in stock?

 

[bill001g]

You really don't have to adjust the signal levels if you don't want. It can be complex to get correct. This is more important when you use the same SSID when they are different other than for interference the signal levels from the other wifi source will not have any impact. There will only be 1 choice of ssid and it will use that even if a different SSID is stronger. There are some cases where people use all the same SSID and it will connect on the 2.4g band even thought the weaker 5g band using the same ssid will be much faster.

You best solution if you could make it work would be to put a AP in every room.

The problem with wifi6 is it is pretty much a dead technology. Your average consumer doesn't know this because the manufactures want to sell all there existing inventory. I bet many manufactures are starting to switch over to wifi6e equipment. Hard to say they are pretty quite. There is only 1 router from asus and one card form intel I have seen announced but I don't think you can actually buy either one. Then again lots of stuff is in short supply, like high end video cards and power supplies.

What I would consider doing is make something work as inexpensively as possible with the idea that you might replace it all with wifi6e next summer.

 

[papb2020]

Thanks, Bill. I had heard the rumblings of 6e but didnt realize it was effectively killing off wifi 6. Very helpful; I will wait it out.

 

[papb2020]

I bought a TP-Link EAP225 Amada AP, AC1350. I figured this was a cheap solution that should give me solid wifi performance for the immediate future.

I am using the PoE adapter it came with. The adapter is near the router. The AP is about 40 ft away via Cat5e cable. I fired up the system without issue. Inssider registers signal strength under -20dbm when I am a foot from the AP and records the max speed near expected 216/866 for 2.4/5ghz. I left channel on auto but I did verify it is choosing the least occupied channels.

Problem is that my speed tests are abysmal. PING is under 20ms but I get only 10-20 mb/s download. When I was using my netgear extender (EX6100v2) with the same cable (no PoE), I can achieve my expected 300 mb/s download on the 5ghz network.

I tested this with and without WMM/QOS enabled. Speeds are the same for both 2.4 and 5 ghz networks.

Any idea what's going on here?

 

[papb2020]

so i dont get it. I just plugged back in the ex6100v2, ran a speed test and then plugged back in the tp-link and ran a speed test. Here are the results:

on 5ghz about a foot away from AP:

1. netgear ex6100v2 i get 17/281/12 for ping/download/upload
2. with TP Link AP: 17/322/12

Clearly its working now. Even though I rebooted it several times during set up maybe it needed one more reboot to get squared away?

weird..

 

[bill001g]

Equipment can be very strange at times, I guess that is why reboot/power cycle fixes so many computer problems in general.

I would not mess the WMM features. They really should not even put those on consumer routers. They pretty much do nothing. In theory it can priortize video and audio but every video service like netflix, youtube etc is not considered video by this feature. It would be something like a video conference system but again the common ones used like zoom are also not considered video. It only works on a very narrow form of video/audio that is generally not used on the internet.

 

[papb2020]

The TP-Link EAP225 is acting up again. I unplugged it to move it around to find the ideal location. After returning it back to the original spot, I am back to getting <10mbps download on both frequencies. Upload is low, but ping is good. I've reboot it several times. The firmware is up to date. I have stood next to the AP with transmission power reduced and set to max. I have identified the lowest traffic frequencies. I have forced the wireless mode to N only on 2.4 and AC on 5ghz.

I plug back in my netgear ex6100v2 extender in place of the TPlink AP and my speeds are good again (200+down and 10+ up). So I know its not the wire or location.

Not sure what else to try at this point. Any ideas here?

 

[bill001g]

It still could be the ethernet. They may work with some device and not others when they go bad.

It almost sounds like you have defective radios but they are 2 different chips so it would be strange for both to fail. Maybe call tplink and see if they will replace it since you just purchased it. Their support is pretty good for as cheap as they sell stuff.

 

[papb2020]

I've gone through tons of troubleshooting here to no real avail. Tweaking settings seem to fix most the problems. 2.4ghz appears to work fine but 5ghz is still temperamental.

Here are some of the things I tested

• The ethernet cables between router and AP with a cheap plug tester and they were good.
• iperf3 on two pc across hardwired using the cable that normally goes to the AP and I get a gigabit transfer rate.
• I have optimized width and frequency
• I have relocated the AP and used different cables

Still no success. One minute I get 200+mbps on the 5ghz, the next (and much more often), I get only 20-30mbps (even when right in front of the AP). I am going to reach out to TP link support again.