Many device wireless solution

[Weston Hullander]

So I am a networking major at college right now and I am in a fraternity. We are moving houses next month and I have been put in charge of getting the network set up. we will have ~20 people with ~60 devices in the house. I'm looking for help on what would be the best way to go about it! The house is 2 stories and is about 3000 square feet. Any help is appreciated!

 

[abailey]

Are all the rooms going to be wired for Ethernet? You plan to supply wireless for the whole house? What kind of internet connection will you have? Do you plan to have it so each person is isolated from everyone else?

 

[Weston Hullander]

there will not be ethernet access anywhere, the whole network has to be wireless, we have 100mbs business class cable internet from charter, and nothing has to be isolated, my main concern is performance. lots of online gaming and video streaming will be happening simultaneously.

 

[abailey]

cool. A couple more questions. Do you have a budget for the project? Will your WAP have to be located in one location are will you be able to wire a few around the house? Also, will the cable company give you a modem/router or only a modem?

 

[Weston Hullander]

cool. A couple more questions. Do you have a budget for the project? Will your WAP have to be located in one location are will you be able to wire a few around the house? Also, will the cable company give you a modem/router or only a modem?

money isnt really an issue, hopefully it will be in place for many years and getting a quality solution will pay for itself. we wont be able to run any wire but wireless extenders are something ive been considering, the cable company will provide a router but past experience has shown it is far from a quality solution. i was planning on only getting the modem from them.

 

[abailey]

Wow that is going to be tricky. I would definitely go with pro level AP's. There are the usual ones like Cisco and such but I have had extremely good luck with Ubiquiti AP's (and their routers too). They are professional level and the controller software gives great reports and real time traffic stats as well as lets you set up multiple SSID's and use rate limiting (which I would definitely do so no one could hog all the bandwidth). I would get the Ubiquiti Unify AP Pro for your WAP. In your installation I would put in an AP that can do both 5ghz and 2.4ghz. 2.4ghz only has 3 true channels on it where you are not competing with someone else. Anyway set up 2 SSID's, one for 2.4ghz and one for 5ghz. I would encourage those that can use the 5ghz to take advantage. Your situation is really a tough one. Letting everyone connect wirelessly for browsing and such is one thing, gaming is totally different. I also like Ubiquiti's routers. I use their Edge Router Lite at home and it is extremely powerful (but may not be the thing for your install if you don't think you would be comfortable programming a pro type router).

 

[Weston Hullander]

Wow that is going to be tricky. I would definitely go with pro level AP's. There are the usual ones like Cisco and such but I have had extremely good luck with Ubiquiti AP's (and their routers too). They are professional level and the controller software gives great reports and real time traffic stats as well as lets you set up multiple SSID's and use rate limiting (which I would definitely do so no one could hog all the bandwidth). I would get the Ubiquiti Unify AP Pro for your WAP. In your installation I would put in an AP that can do both 5ghz and 2.4ghz. 2.4ghz only has 3 true channels on it where you are not competing with someone else. Anyway set up 2 SSID's, one for 2.4ghz and one for 5ghz. I would encourage those that can use the 5ghz to take advantage. Your situation is really a tough one. Letting everyone connect wirelessly for browsing and such is one thing, gaming is totally different. I also like Ubiquiti's routers. I use their Edge Router Lite at home and it is extremely powerful (but may not be the thing for your install if you don't think you would be comfortable programming a pro type router).

what would be your opinion on extenders? the house is probable nearly 75' long and 50' feet wide, im worried about range as well. any extender suggestions? or maybe just 2 ap's would be better? also i have lots of experience programming cisco routers using cli and ccp, so i may be able to use more advanced solutions, anything more advanced you would recommend?

 

[abailey]

Cool! If you can program Cisco routers and use CLI I would definitely recommend the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite (ERL) as your router. It comes with no config so you have to set up the interfaces and firewall rules, NAT, etc. But it is extremely powerful and uses pro level IOS. You can program it completely from the CLI or you can use the GUI for many of the functions. I would not use a wireless extender as it cuts your throughput in half and it uses a channel to connect, further causing congestion problems when you have many people connecting. I would find a way to put a second AP in, even if you have to use a powerline adapter. I hate powerline adapters but the newest adapters support the AV2 standard and can usually give you at least 100Mbit under even pretty bad conditions (or older house wiring). If you do get 2 AP's and you choose the Ubiquiti Unifi AP's, they support Zero Handoff Roaming so your device does not have to reauthenicate as you change from one AP to another. Any way you can get the same stuff from other pro gear like Cisco but Ubiquity is much more economical.

 

[Weston Hullander]

Cool! If you can program Cisco routers and use CLI I would definitely recommend the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite (ERL) as your router. It comes with no config so you have to set up the interfaces and firewall rules, NAT, etc. But it is extremely powerful and uses pro level IOS. You can program it completely from the CLI or you can use the GUI for many of the functions. I would not use a wireless extender as it cuts your throughput in half and it uses a channel to connect, further causing congestion problems when you have many people connecting. I would find a way to put a second AP in, even if you have to use a powerline adapter. I hate powerline adapters but the newest adapters support the AV2 standard and can usually give you at least 100Mbit under even pretty bad conditions (or older house wiring). If you do get 2 AP's and you choose the Ubiquiti Unifi AP's, they support Zero Handoff Roaming so your device does not have to reauthenicate as you change from one AP to another. Any way you can get the same stuff from other pro gear like Cisco but Ubiquity is much more economical.

Im torn between the 0 latency hand-off and the economy of the edge, is there a significant performance betweeen the edge and ap pro?

 

[bill001g]

Be very careful there really is no such thing as "ZERO" latency handoff. What this feature does is it allows the the master key that was generated by the radius server to be transferred to other AP to avoid the delays associated with reauthenticating with the radius server. This is very useful if you are using token type of security where you must key in a different number each time you authenticate.

This master key that is shared does the same function as preshared keys used in non radius authenticated wireless networks.

It still must generate the unique keys to be used between the AP and end station. This requires the standard 4 way handshake messages used to generate the real session keys since the mac address of the net AP is used in the key exchanged messages.

These 4 handshake messages can cause tiny outages and also take a packet or two for the switches to relearn the new port the mac is on. You generally still lose a ping or two.

This may not matter if you are using preshared keys then this feature does nothing it is only advantages when you are using 802.1x which generally uses a external radius server. Both still will do the 4 way handshake

 

[abailey]

I don't know if there is much performance differencr between the edge and Ap Pro. I agree that I would not base my decision on the Zero Latency Handoff feature. I would base it more off of a pro AP vs a consumer AP. I would not go with a consumer AP.