Wireless Networking

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Hey Guys;

I am curious if anyone here has gone as far as setting up their home with those wireless hubs like you find at offices where being connected is seamless throughout the house and is super quick too.

I have tried those home plug things before ... but they aren't that great, so the office setup looks interesting but not sure what is really involved in doing that.
 
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You mean Wireless Access Points?

To do this properly, you would need to run a cat5 cable from your main router to where you want to position your additional access point. This is essentially what the home plug is trying to emulate.
 
Unless you're dealing with something huge such as a warehouse or a site spread across several buildings then I'd still go wired even if some of your devices are only capable of a 10/100 Ethernet connection. Don't get me wrong, wireless has come on leaps and bounds from b to g to n and now ac. Dual band routers help. MIMO too. Filling in dead spots with WAPs... great. However, when push comes to shove all the speed figures quoted are for best case scenarios with transmission in free space over a relatively short distance and without competing interference from other networks and 2.4GHz devices; and without network collisions; and with just a single device or one per band rather than half a dozen all competing for a slice of the wireless bandwidth.

By the time you've done a wireless survey and moved the (wired) WAPs around for best coverage then you could have probably run copper.
 
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Agree better to run wired to known connected appliance points (e.g office, TV points, etc). But also useful to have a decent wireless signal too.

E.g for phones, iPads, etc.

Therefore (IMO) makes sense to add a wireless access point to (say) 1st floor landing to supplement wireless router on ground floor if there isn't a good signal throughout.
 
Another +1 for Lucid's post.

Some wireless AP's will also give you headaches where the zones overlap - you can get your devices trying to hop from one AP to another which can cause all sorts of headaches. Plus the other issue is wireless 'noise' - the more devices you have using it the more wireless performance is likely to suffer.

My advice for best performance would be run Cat 6 cable (if you can stretch to it but make sure it's proper Cat 6, Cat 5e if not) to key locations e.g. stuff that's not going to be moving around, Broadband router, back of TV, where computer lives (if you have a desktop) back to an area out of the way that has power e.g. loft, under stairs cupboard. In that area put an unmanaged gigabit switch to link up your network. If you've got the room (and bear airflow etc in mind to keep kit cool) where your switch is you could also add in a network drive etc. If you've got more than one device requiring a cable at a key location you can always drop in another unmanaged switch there - gigabit if you can but 10/100mbps 4-port will do (£6 on amazon).
 
+1 for Lucid's reply.
+++ for wired.
-2 for wireless.
-- for Hi-power wireless.

Where I live (a vilaage estate) I can 'see' between 16 and 25 (2.4GHz) wi-fi points, can log on to the neighbours wifi printer easier than my home wifi (when I have 'my' wifi working on the router - it is easy to switch off in the box).
There is a limited number of channels available (13 overlapping ones in the UK 2.4GHz band) so the more channels working will cause mutual inteference and slow everyones connections down.

This is an interesting read...
 
It's been a while since I have come back to this site and clearly the answer is to have wired where ever possible and then wireless for those devices that just don't support wired

I'll go away and do further research on this topic ... finding the balance without ripping up the house is going to be key.
 
hybrid is the answer. for devices that stay in one place. cat6. via decent gigabit switch is ideal. for everything else. wifi is fine.
 
It's been a while since I have come back to this site and clearly the answer is to have wired where ever possible and then wireless for those devices that just don't support wired

I'll go away and do further research on this topic ... finding the balance without ripping up the house is going to be key.
Once you scratch the surface the whole topic of wireless becomes a lot more complex than most folk imagine. On top of AC, Dual Band and MiMo there's 80MHz channels, 256-QAM, Beam Forming in both explicit and implicit (universal) forms and of course whether or not your other wireless devices support some or all of this technology.

Before investing in WAPs (and especially if you're considering any such WAP that connects wirelessly to the router) you might want to have a look at how your current router stacks up against the best-in-class products out there. I'll cut to the chase here: If your router was supplied by your ISP then fir wireless it sucks. Yes, even the BT Infinity-and-beyond super-duper wireless hub sucks at doing wireless. It might be better than the other free wireless routers from other ISPs, but once measured against decent paid-for routers in the £100-£200 price bracket. Changing your home router might just solve your problems.

Coincidentally, my Netgear N wireless router has just died so I'm in the market for something b/g/n/ac myself. It would be easy to spend £300-£400 on a top-of-the-range wireless router but the benefits would be wasted in my home. Besides which, most of the performance gains of an AC7200-speed router with WiGig are vapourware since they're only consistently achievable in lab conditions. Having said that, I know that a £50 router won't cut it either as it will become outdated too quickly (if not already).

My feature short list centres around the following:

(a) good compatibility with my legacy gear (b/g/n devices), which means I'm looking for something with good beam forming so that the wireless signal "targets" those devices. That might mean a router with external aerials, and this will help WiFi speeds both on short range and long range connections.

(b) something that supports 2x2 and 3x3 data streams for 256 QAM support. This is wireless compression format that packs more data into each wave. Smartphones and tablets are likely to be the main beneficiary; my Samsung Galaxy smartphone for example

(c) MiMo is a given. I want 2.4GHz (b/g) devices to work without interfering with or impeding the speed of 5GHz (n) devices


Stuff that I know will be of limited benefit: 40 and 80MHz channels. There's too much competition from nearby routers so I can't have almost the entire 5 Ghz channel to myself.

Something like the Netgear R7000 or a D-Link DIR-868L would probably tick most of my boxes. Both of these would wipe the floor with anything supplied as part of an ISP contract.
 
And all those things said, valid points for sure, I do have one of those wireless things they have in offices/hotels and I'm delighted with it. Theyre the older generation Ubiquiti Unifi access points, were about 40 quid on eBay and another fiver for the power adapter (they get their power from the Ethernet network wire, so a special power adapter is required, aka a PoE injector). They aren't the fastest, being a generation behind, but I really haven't needed them to be.

I have strong signal all over the house, fast enough for the iPads (wifi) to stream movies off Kodi on the box (a gigabyte Brix micro PC, also on wifi) behind the TV.
They're rock solid; I haven't rebooted them once in the 5 months I've lived here
They're a doddle to set up; an app you run on a PC/i device lets you configure them via a wizard that sets sensible defaults for all the settings you can't see
They support multiple networks; I have a house one and a passwordless guest one with a lower speed
They naturally cooperate to extend the reach of your wireless; your devices just see one network, and automatically transfer to whichever box's signal they are receiving most strongly

Note that these devices aren't just some crappy half arsed gimmick to extend the range of the wifi from your bog standard (I.e. As cheap as the accounts department could screw the manufacturer down to) ISP router, they're a designed and dedicated commercial solution for the likes of hotels, multi tenant office blocks and airports. New, they cost twice each what a reasonable router costs. They're also relatively dumb, in that they aren't a router, they're purely a wireless access point and are totally incapable of performing the necessary wizardry to share your net connection to all the devices in your home.
For setup you will need a router, and you'd be best to turn its wifi off. If you aren't going to buy a dedicated POE switch to provide power to these things, you'll need to get some PoE injectors. The actual setup is simple: connect your isp router (or a better one) to your phone line, connect the PoE injector to an Ethernet socket on the back of the router, connect the UnifiAP to the PoE injector, connect your computer to another socket on the router, use the Ubiquiti app to configure the UnifiAP. Repeat for multiple UnifiAPs
Responsibility for wifi is solely with the UnifiAP. Your routers only job now is to give each of your network pcs an IP address and share the internet to it. If your isp router doesn't have a gigabit switch in, swap it out or buy a gig switch and connect it between the PoE injector and the router. If you buy a gig switch that has PoE injectors built in, get rid of the separate PoE injector. If you're using an older unifi model that doesn't run on industry standard PoE (48volts) you need a voltage converter stick (nearly all the ones on eBay that don't use standard PoE do already come with such a stick.. it's white with an Ethernet socket at each end)


Now, there are factors that mean these things work particularly well for me -
I'm rural, so few competing neighbour signals.
My walls are a metre thick and faced on the inside with aluminised vapour control membrane, so neighbouring signals are incredibly weak.
My house is a timber frame with fairly radio-transparent stud walls, so I only need 2 of these APs, mounted centrally one on each floor, to provide good coverage. I'll add an external one and a garage one later.
Despite being techie at work, I don't have a huge bandwidth requirement at home, so I'm not a proponent of "wired for everything that's got an Ethernet socket cuz wifi suxx OMG!" but then again I think most people don't have massive bandwidth requirements for their everyday internet - I really don't need anything more than 72mbps on my iPad as this is way higher than the required data rate to stream something off the TV. Sure if you're into video editing and your massive data storage device is in the basement and your work PC is in the loft then put a 10gigabit network between them but I do think a lot of people who super tech their place out because they need/want to (and are best placed to answer your question) then forget that the requirements of an everyday person's Facebook usage doesn't require anything like what they do
 
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By this I mean proper copper and not copper coated aluminium (CCA) - this goes for both Cat6 and Cat5e.

I read a research paper recently that showed CCA to outperform copper, in terms of electrical resistance, at certain signal frequencies. I was investigating in the context of speaker wire, but it may not be valid to assert "CCA is always **** compared to real pure copper"
 
CCA to outperform copper, in terms of electrical resistance, at certain signal frequencies.
At high frequency the signal flows in the surface layer of the conductor, at high frequency a copper pipe will have a similar impedance to solid copper rod.
 

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