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How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

triplebyte.com

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Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of peoples' houses don't have WAN connections that need the capabilities of the higher-spec mikrotik routers anyways. An RB3011 or RB4011 is overkill for a residential cablemodem or VDSL2 based last mile service, in terms of pps and Mbps capacity, and NAT pps ability. The ubnt ER-X ($48) is good for up to about 700 Mbps of traffic, and comes with sane defaults. If you have truly symmetric 1 Gbps ful…

Why an edge router over unifi, for smaller setups (Triplebyte is what, 30 office people?)

From what I understand, some features on the USG aren't available unless you manipulate some JSON files, whereas they're exposed in the UI in the Edge Routers.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a full UniFi setup in my home office/house and it is glorious. It Just Works! Well, with the one exception which is the Cloud Key. I’ve yet to see it run for more than 24 hours before soft rocking and requiring a total re-setup of the network.

I have my unifi controller running on a raspberry pie and it has been very reliable. Might be worth a shot.

Having spent too much time on HN today, I’m going to try put a PiHole on the same Pi as a home controller that is especially under taxed. Will see if this combo works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#73
Generally pretty solid advice. I say that as someone who is known for solving tough wireless problems. :-)

On the cable termination part: I've (mostly) stopped crimping cables because I've had too many go flaky and don't have 4-5 figure testing equipment. One thing I'll add is that there are ends for solid conductor and stranded, make SURE you have the right ones for the cable you are using.

These days I always just put on keystone ends and then use commercial patch cables from there. I've had very good luck. I'd recommend against the advice to use a screw driver to punch them down, the Leviton ones I prefer you just put the cap on and they punch down themselves. The random ones I get from Ace Hardware have a little punch tool included.

One additional recommendation I have is to put 5GHz radios in each space. 5GHz has more spectrum, and less interference, but it penetrates drywall significantly worse. But that's a good thing, because it cuts down on interference from your neighbors.

Beware of microwave ovens, baby monitors, cordless phones (last 2 more in residential areas). They can be intermittent interference, and won't show up on the non-commercial spectrum analyzers. Our 2.4GHz used to go out when we'd run our brand new microwave. But it would also go out at other times, possibly when a neighbor ran theirs? 2.4GHz penetrates buildings quite well, which kind of sucks.

My credentials: https://www.tummy.com/articles/pycon2012-network/

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#74

> connection requires only 8 of the 16 physical connections to be made successfully. A working 1000BASE-T (gigabit) connection requires all 16 of 16! Small error here, should be 4 of 8 and 8 of 8, respectively ;)

The sentence you copied started with an important qualifier: "Counting both ends of a cable,"

> If you’re new to making cables

However, IMO if you're making your own patch cables, you're so far on the wrong side of what's reasonable that I don't know what else to say. Punching down horizontal cabling to jacks makes sense; there's no other choice. Making patch cables is an enormous waste of resources.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#75

While it doesn't really matter whether you use EIA-586-B or EIA-586-A so long as you're consistent, I've been told that EIA-586-A is the standard in Canada. addendum: Re crimping RJ45 - the better way to do terminations is to use the EZ-RJ45 pass-through plugs like the ones made by Platinum Tools. You need a special crimper, but it's night and day easier. If you're using AWG23 Cat 6, you also need to make sure your p…

Holy crap, that is awesome! I might start crimping my own cables again! Nah, but still good to know.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#76

Generally pretty solid advice. I say that as someone who is known for solving tough wireless problems. :-) On the cable termination part: I've (mostly) stopped crimping cables because I've had too many go flaky and don't have 4-5 figure testing equipment. One thing I'll add is that there are ends for solid conductor and stranded, make SURE you have the right ones for the cable you are using. These days I always just…

>> I've (mostly) stopped crimping cables because I've had too many go flaky and don't have 4-5 figure testing equipment.

I just redid a lot of the ethernet wiring in my house, and it's super easy compared to how I did it 10+ years ago.

If you use EZ-RJ45 jacks (the only way to go, imo), it's super easy to get cables working properly the very first time. The wires feed through the jack so you can verify wire order before crimping.

I spent less than $200 on the tools I used to do my wiring:

* EZ-RJ45 crimper

* RJ45 cable tester with probe and toner (this was easily the most important tool I bought)

* Punchdown Tool

* An adjustable Cat 5 stripper

Out of the several cables I did, I only had one with problems, I wired one end backwards (it was before I had my morning coffee), and it was quickly "debugged" with my cable tester.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#77
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the cost, I'd agree that Ubnt gear is quite good. I use it at home, and rarely have any problems. That said, I'd like to provide one caveat: In my experience, they tend to not do great in very noisy RF environments. Twice now I've deployed Unifi APs in offices with RF spectra similar to what the OP has going on, and we had nothing but problems. In each case, we ripped out the Ubnt gear, replaced with equivalent R…

I've had similar issues with Ubiquiti in a noisy RF environment. The 2.4GHz spectrum was extremely saturated and people were frequently dropped whenever they were on it. Thankfully, the neighbors aren't using 5GHz too much--I just turned off 2.4GHz for our own WiFi and it seems to have solved the issue. Still, very annoying and took a long time to figure out.

I found vastly more expensive Meraki APs to deal with noise way worse than Ubiquiti (but that's all I've used so I can't compare to others).

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#78
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Ubiquity has an option to force clients off of individual APs when their signal falls too low. Bad for WiFi at distance but good for roaming within an office.

The setting is a mbps setting. If the negotiated rate falls below X, disconnect.

Nah it's RSSI-based.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#79
post #6

>Assign static IPs for infrastructure like access points. This makes them easy to reach when reconfiguration is needed Am I missing something, or did they buy consumer routers to use as access points? Triplebyte, I can save you a ton of management, troubleshooting, and learning time: switch to Ubiquiti Unifi or an equivelant now, youll have one pane of glass to reconfigure every device. The devices will talk to each…

I have a full UniFi setup in my home office/house and it is glorious. It Just Works! Well, with the one exception which is the Cloud Key. I’ve yet to see it run for more than 24 hours before soft rocking and requiring a total re-setup of the network.

The new (but not widely available) Cloud Key Gen 2+ model is much more stable. It also has a battery so it can gracefully shut down mongodb after 10 seconds of no power. The + model replaces the cloud key and nvr. There is a non-plus model coming as well but that hasn't been released yet.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#80
post #56

It’s only sort of passively mentioned in the article but I am AMAZED at the number of people who don’t hardwire everything they can. Obviously phones are out, but why not hardwire every laptop when it’s at the desk? If someone’s using a actual desktop computer like an iMac then what’s the point of Wi-Fi? Clear up the signal space and get a 100% reliable and ultra fast connection.

You got a wifi problem? I'll bring the cable.
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