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Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

troyhunt.com

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Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#191

As a european I find this totally ridiculous. 500 square meter house? That's enough for an apartment building with 10 units. Wifi won't be the only problems that are caused by such a waste of resources. How are those problems making your life better? Here DSL router/modems by AVM (Fritz!box) are really common and they do their job extraordinarily well for being consumer grade hardware. They also regularly get regular…

I have a 150 sqm Apartment in Munich and it is very long. Like spanning alongside the house for nearly 45 meters. There is no way one FritzBox would be able to give me solid coverage from my kitchen (all the way to the west) to my bath (all the way to the east). Two Ubiquiti APs for about 150 Euros solve this problem, including Features like roaming and bandwidth steering.

Yes, a FritzBox might be enough for most people but it is not the perfect solution for all problems.

On a related note, I find your tone a little ondescending. Troy has big house, so what? There are people in Europe with bigger houses, too, you know?

Also, dedicated wifi hardware like Ubiquiti APs or Netgear Orbis are way better when it comes to handling your wifi when there are 25+ other networks in your area.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#192

what is a good way to connect router or access points OVER WIFI. i dont have wired backhaul in my office and it would be fairly cumbersome to build one. are there APs with two radios each - one for backhaul and one for service?

As others said, if you have a wifi router that supports DD-WRT you can turn it into a client bridge or a repeater bridge.

https://www.flashrouters.com/blog/2011/10/19/what-is-the-dif...

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, 50sqm are barely enough for one person to live in. That said, yes, 70sqm is pretty okay, and 500 is just overkill. Our "fits a family of four comfortably" size is 200sqm, I can't imagine what one would do with more than doubling that. Cleaning would be a pain. Also, software-wise, my Tomato-based router does everything described in the post, and I haven't had a single problem yet. It cost $100 (but it doesn'…

50sqm for one person is more than enough where I live. I grew up in a household of four in a 60sqm apartment and it was totally fine. I've lived alone in 30sqm apartments and 60sqm apartments. Haven't seen much of a difference, besides that having more than 2 people over in a 30sqm apartment gets claustrophobic. 500sqm house seems totally ridiculous to me.

Actually, you're right, my previous flat was pretty tight and I thought it was 50sqm, but I just remembered it was actually 35sqm.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#194
post #167
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know a good way to implement wireless roaming around a large home? I had Ubiquity's Zero-Handoff on my list of things to check out, but seems they don't use it anymore, and as above it was a hack anyway. I have been for years using (and recommending to others) multiple access points (of any brand) wired together and just set them up with the same SSID and passwords. Usually works mostly OK, although VoIP…

Have the APs limit the RSSI and let the client roam.

This.

If the OP of this thread would take a few minutes and read through Ubiquiti forums they'd know that there have been 10's of conversations wherein someone from Ubiquiti or a power use has explained why you shouldn't be using the old ZHO hacks. I said this yesterday in another Ubiquiti focused comment, but 1) ZHO forces all AP into the same L2 network and 2) ZHO puts all AP on the same channel and SSID. The last one should be blatant enough for anyone to know that that's not going to scale or be performant. ZHO was implemented for old, low bandwidth devices that needed to be on the same network. Full stop. Don't use ZHO!

Beyond that do some due diligence when setting up your networks. Even with 802.11n/ac in the 5GHz range you should be aware of best spectrum usage, about things like DFS and consider how wide of a band you're allocating to the channel selection your making (hint: it impacts overlap). Do not do not do not use auto channel selection unless you're forced to. I get it, you may not have control over this in a dense environment (apartment) but if you can control your airspace (reasonably so) map out channel utilization especially if you have more than one AP. Then go to the next step and figure out the worse spots for reception in your house are and, as the person above me states, tune RSSI down to get clients to get kicked as they "roam". This will force them to reselect much faster. One comment stated 8 second reassociations. That's just bad tuning and clear ignorance to the problem - you'd have the same thing with any other vendor.

This wasn't hard to find and there are many others, use it: http://securityuncorked.com/2013/11/the-best-damn-802-11ac-c...

I think Ubiquiti makes some really great products for the price. Have they violated GPL? Quite possibly but as others have said I don't think that's been proven judicially as of yet. You will get one of the best products at this price point though and, when setup correctly, will be much more performance than things like Eero or Google Wifi that relies on wireless as the backhaul between APs. If you're saying you can't use cabled infrastructure there are options. 1) Powerline is now "decent" as in 400-700 Mbit are attainable depending on your situation, they're also much cheaper (look for HomePlug AV2 standardization) now 2) Dedicated, directional focused wireless backhaul is the better option than an omni backhaul between something that is already handling your clients. That is Ubiquiti's forte. They only recently released the UniFi product but you can use NanoBeam, Bullet or NanoStation in your home to move things around to dedicated AP.

Ultimately if you want good wifi you have to pay for it and plan and deploy it correctly. The second half of it is why we have Eero and Google Wifi - because people don't do that. They buy Ubiquiti or some other enterprise focused WLAN solution, plug it in and do the minimal work and say it doesn't work or sucks without RTFM.

Finally if you want "fast roaming" you should know what you want before buying a product since the device OS needs to support it. Apple has basically said they're supporting 802.11r: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202628. And 802.11r is in the latest builds of UniFi firmware, but not really exposed to the GUI config because, well, people will probably shoot themselves in the foot with it.

Edit: added link to channel allocation graphics

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#195

So I have posted this before as there has been a ton of Ubiquiti threads. 3 story house, 1 AP AC Pro per floor 1 AP AC Pro in the detached office 1 Switch 16 POE in the house 1 Switch 16 POE in the office - 2 x Cat6a between switches in a LAG 1 Security Gateway 3P 1 Cloud Key I upgraded all the firmware on the complete system as I was typing this message using their app for the iPad. Run a FreeNAS Mini in the office…

any specific reason you went for the Pro and not the LR?

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#197

Great story. Unfortunately i do not have the luxury to spend $2200 on the network infrastructure in my humble home. I do however have a lot of 2nd hand hardware and am able to invest some time into optimizing them for my family's internet needs. It may not be perfect, but it works 90% of the time and i learn a lot about connecting lots of different devices and (virtual) machines.

1 Unifi LR, 1 Unifi Lite covers all my 150 sqm and cost less than a "high end consumer Wifi Router", about 130 Euros. You don't need so many aps, Troy went a little overboard, imho. And you can start with one LR and just expand the network if you need more.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#198

what is a good way to connect router or access points OVER WIFI. i dont have wired backhaul in my office and it would be fairly cumbersome to build one. are there APs with two radios each - one for backhaul and one for service?

you might want to look into the Netgear Orbi line, a wifi mesh solution. I tested one at home, the wif connection of the satellite ist really fast and responsive, better than any repeater I tried.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#199
post #21
post #2

Ubiquiti is the best. Their stuff rivals and even beats lots of the more expensive stuff at a fraction of the price. It's all very high quality but so cheap that you think they are joking when you see the price. Edge router: amazing Edge switch: amazing AC access points: amazing I've never tried any of the unifi stuff though.

Their AC APs are pretty power intensive, last time I tried them they were drawing well over 20 watts each, which would have required we replace our switches due to the power requirements.

Looking at the data from my Unifi switch, each UAP-AC-PRO is drawing 2.5 to 4.5W.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#200

One could just as easily get a few cheap laptops from a rummage sale and install Linux on them and turn them into powerful APs within a few minutes with a live environment.

While I agree that you can, and I have done so before (at home). There's frankly no way I would ever even consider something like this in a business environment. Depending on your work situation, i.e. full or most time work from home, this would include my home.
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