Wifi Setup for Fraternity House

[LtDan_29]

So very recently the wifi in our house stopped working. Right now, it uses some sort of PC as a server, but I don't really know how that works, so I don't know how to fix it. I would like to totally scrap the setup we have and start over, while reusing some of the old hardware of course. My question is, what is a cheap but very strong setup that we could use. On average about 15 people live in this house, but at any time there could be about 40 people all connected on their phones and other devices. My first idea is to just have a few wireless access points throughout the house that all connect back to one switch connected to the router, but I have no idea if this will actually be effective. Any help is much appreciated.

 

[kanewolf]

The PC server you have may be a firewall. Something like a PfSense -- https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/#requirements

Using POE commercial access points would be the best answer. Look at the Ubiquiti system -- https://www.ubnt.com/enterprise/

Moving as many devices as possible to wired will improve things a lot.

 

[LtDan_29]

The PC server you have may be a firewall. Something like a PfSense -- https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/#requirements

Using POE commercial access points would be the best answer. Look at the Ubiquiti system -- https://www.ubnt.com/enterprise/

Moving as many devices as possible to wired will improve things a lot.

I do remember seeing PfSense on the screen when I was trying to fix it. Do you think that this is a necessary thing to have? Do you think that having a wired connection to each room for gaming systems or desktops or whatever plus an access point on each floor would suffice?

 

[kanewolf]

I definitely think that wired to every room would help. Also several to each of the common rooms. Streaming TVs or music would benefit from wired connectivity.

Whether you need a PfSense firewall, I can't really say. Do you impose prohibitions on torrents ? Do you need accountability logs retained ? This is a policy/legal question as much as technical. You need to meet with the fraternity leadership to discuss this. You will have much more capabilities with a PfSense firewall than you will with many other options.

I don't know if you need security cameras. If so, then when doing this other wiriring is a good time to wire for POE cameras.

 

[LtDan_29]

I definitely think that wired to every room would help. Also several to each of the common rooms. Streaming TVs or music would benefit from wired connectivity.

Whether you need a PfSense firewall, I can't really say. Do you impose prohibitions on torrents ? Do you need accountability logs retained ? This is a policy/legal question as much as technical. You need to meet with the fraternity leadership to discuss this. You will have much more capabilities with a PfSense firewall than you will with many other options.

I don't know if you need security cameras. If so, then when doing this other wiriring is a good time to wire for POE cameras.

I really hope no one is doing illegal stuff on our internet... But as far as I know, it would be mostly used for Streaming, gaming, social media, and homework.

One thing I heard is that this PfSense thing kinda stabilizes and evenly distributes download speeds. Does this sound even remotely reasonable? This is the main thing that is stopping me from tearing out the system and redoing it.

 

[nigelivey]

You can do traffic shaping, limiters and Qs with Pfsense which would allow fair access to everyone on the network but its quite a complicated feature to configure so its hard to know if its been set up and if its been set up correctly. One way to tell would be to run speed test on different devices and see if you either get limited speed across devices (limiters) or whether it evens the bandwidth out as more and more devices are connected (limiters with Qs).