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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

#11

Post by brian-armstrong »

compumike wrote: post #2

We had internal debates about different SSIDs for 2.4 vs 5 GHz, but in the end, this is the optimal configuration we landed on. I was also surprised by how slow S3 was with a single download connection, but really fast when using aria2 to parallelize the download.

Putting 2.4 and 5 onthe same SSID is a recipe for sadness. OSX does very poorly at deciding which band it should be on, and 2.4 is largely useless in most of SF. OSX also tends to be pretty sticky. The worst is that it uses RSSI as its metric rather than SNR.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#12

Post by comboy »

basch wrote: 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…

The above may sound like an Ubiquiti ad, but I've tested a few top specs routers about 2 years ago and settled with unifi for my home installation. I needed a good coverage and reliability for my home automation, e.g. when I switch lights on/off I want a consistent few milliseconds latency.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#13

Post by basch »

comboy wrote: post #12
basch wrote: 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…

The above may sound like an Ubiquiti ad, but I've tested a few top specs routers about 2 years ago and settled with unifi for my home installation. I needed a good coverage and reliability for my home automation, e.g. when I switch lights on/off I want a consistent few milliseconds latency.

One of the FEW downsides for smaller installations, is them not selling a Cloud Key, Gateway, and Switch in a single box.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#14

Post by thesausageking »

basch wrote: 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…

Came here to say this. No networking engineer would ever buy consumer hardware for an office of this size. It will cost a lot more in management, debugging, and downtime. Spend the slightly more it will cost for devices that are able to work together.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#15

Post by basch »

thesausageking wrote: post #14
basch wrote: 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…

Came here to say this. No networking engineer would ever buy consumer hardware for an office of this size. It will cost a lot more in management, debugging, and downtime. Spend the slightly more it will cost for devices that are able to work together.

And its even bad advice for a small home network vs an Orbi, AiMesh, or Unifi setup.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#16

Post by sandGorgon »

basch wrote: 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…

Same as this , except with one change. For the router, use the (cheaper and more powerful) Mikrotik Routerboards. We don't use a Poe switch - we just use cheap Poe adapters and connect directly to the routerboard.

For those who have never touched a Ubiquiti, configuring it could be a little iffy . I normally advise setting up DHCP 43 advertisement on the router before trying to setup the access points.

But seriously, this stuff scales.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#17

Post by sbradford26 »

basch wrote: 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 always second a Ubiquiti recommendation. They have a great range of products that can serve people wanting robust home networks up to small business scale networks. In college I setup our fraternity to run on a edgerouter lite and 4 UAP-ACs and we went through 2.8TB a month with no issues.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#18

Post by vvanders »

basch wrote: 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…

Yup, all of this. Their HW really is that good for the cost.

Ars' article[1] was the thing that pushed me over the edge and don't regret it at all. Rock solid APs, central management, isolated vlan+ssid just for IoT, just all around good. Was about $300 to get all setup and outstripped all my "pro-sumer" gear by miles.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enter...

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#19

Post by sbradford26 »

basch wrote: post #13
comboy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above may sound like an Ubiquiti ad, but I've tested a few top specs routers about 2 years ago and settled with unifi for my home installation. I needed a good coverage and reliability for my home automation, e.g. when I switch lights on/off I want a consistent few milliseconds latency.

One of the FEW downsides for smaller installations, is them not selling a Cloud Key, Gateway, and Switch in a single box.

I agree. Right now I have the edge router lite. I have it setup so 4 ports are switched together and then I use poe pass-through to power my access point. Then I run the unifi software on a raspberry pi.

I would love at least a gateway/cloud key combo to simplify things. The separate switch doesn't bother me as much though.

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