Matt_C
Distinguished Member
My mum has always been plagued by poor wifi coverage in her house - it's not a small house and wifi upstairs (router/hub is downstairs next to the phone socket) has always been sketchy at best. Years ago I installed two dedicated cat5e runs from the hub downstairs to upstairs bedrooms: one at the front of the house, one at the back. These were both used by static computers, until a few years ago when the one in the front bedroom because a backhaul cable and I used a second hub (both supplied by TalkTalk, my mum's ISP) as a WAP (backhaul into LAN, DHCP server off, same SSID and password) which worked for a while, but then clients stopped roaming between the two AP's and instead began hanging onto the last known one, so I had to split the SSID's on each to different ones and users had to manually select which one to use. I assumed this was down to them being cheap ISP provided gear that doesn't follow 802.11v/k/r (I forget which it is) handoff protocols when the AP's overlap each other but don't fall off enough to force a jump.
So... This ran like this for a while until recently when apparently the internet/wifi stopped working. After the usual "turn it off and on again" didn't solve the issue, apparently one of the lodgers (I wasn't able to get over there to deal with it at the time) took it upon themselves to call the ISP to try and sort it out. I had said in the past not to try and describe the network set up as I knew TalkTalk wouldn't a) be able to fathom it out and b) not support it anyway, and I was right - on both counts. They insisted only one hub should be in use, and then told the lodger to press and hold the reset button which of course wiped out any IP reserving I had and DHCP rules. Anyway, following the ISP's "tech guru's" instructions it was set up with two SSID's, one for 2.4ghz and one for 5ghz, and the upstairs router/AP was left out the equation. Turns out the issue wasn't the hub, it was the broadband supply having a day or so of being wonky, so all the above could have been avoided, but it was enough for me to tire of having two consumer grade POS hubs work against each other, so I talked to my mother about me redoing her entire network. My original plan was to put Apple networking equipment in, since that's what I use and, despite it being outdated, under specced and discontinued, my network has been rock solid for years and years and works fine, plus it's so east to administer since it can all be done from an iOS app. I decided against it for a couple reasons: I was going to put an Airport Extreme in downstairs, se the hub to modem only, connect it to the Extreme via ethernet and then use the backhaul cable to hook up an Airport Express upstairs, which has both a WAN and LAN (for passthrough) so I could pipe internet upstairs for the Express to put out as Wifi and pass through the LAN port to a point in another bedroom (for a static PC). Simple. I decided against it for two reasons: 1) downstairs there are 4 ethernet requirements and the Extreme only has 3 LAN (and one WAN) so I'd be short one connection, and 2) the Express doesn't have gigabit ethernet, only 10/100. Not a huge deal breaker as her broadband is roughly 37 Mbps, and no one in the house is doing heavy internal network traffic, so gigabit isn't hugely necessary, but I was thinking of future proofing.
So... After looking around I decided to go for a Ubiquiti UniFi UAP as the sole WAP: turn the wifi off on the TalkTalk hub, and have the UAP supply just a single SSID (dual band for both 2.4 and 5ghz) that everyone can use. Supposedly, the UniFi UAP's are very good for that, and the PoE made positioning much easier since it didn't need mains power running to where I wanted it. So I decided to mount it on the underside of the hallway ceiling in pretty much the most central point of the house with the infrastructure being:
Hub > backhaul upstairs > Netgear GS105 switch. The GS105 then feeds a cat 6 run a second bedroom and the PoE injector for the UAP. Nodal point is in the upstairs landing cupboard > cat6 from the PoE to the UAP. Simple.
See crude diagram
Everything installed as I wanted it to, I did all my own terminations and punch downs, made up patch cables etc (all tested and running at full speed, so I know I used 568B on everything) and then came the UAP power on (I'd already set it up and configured the SSID, password, etc) at home before installing. Powered on, my laptop (upstairs) connected and it ran great: about 32/33 Mbps on a speed test. My phone, that couldn't even see the TalkTalk hub's 5ghz network upstairs connected with full reception bars. Great! The downstairs front room, when my mum tutors online showed good solid connection too. But this is where it went wrong: the kitchen (which has a middle room between it and the hallway where the UAP is) showed drastically slower link speed than the TalkTalk hub, and in the garden my phone dropped the connection. Using the WifiSweetSpot app I was seeing 359 Mbps (average) link speed between the TalkTalk hub (5ghz) and my phone but only 100 Mbps when connected to the UAP. Granted the TalkTalk hub was only 8 feet away in (almost) line of sight (only a wooden room divider between) and the UAP was roughly 25/30 feet away but I have a feeling the load bearing wall between the UAP and where I was sitting is killing the signal. It's only a couple foot deep from the ceiling (above the doorway) but it's 9 thick brick with old school lime plaster either side, and the UAP wifi has to pass through it rather than go through the open door below it. Couple that with then having to go through an outside wall to the garden, it just couldn't handle it. Annoying, since the UAP I bought as the AC-LR (long range) and it has a 3x3 MIMO antenna config that's supposed to be high output. But whilst the upstairs is better off than it was, the downstairs (on the whole) is worse...
So now I'm stuck what to do. I don't particularly want to have both the TalkTalk hub and the UAP serving wifi, as it kinda defeats the purpose of having the UAP in a central location and I could just put a lower power Express upstairs as a WAP, and run both the hub and Express together (as I did before with the two TalkTalk hubs), or even put an Express both upstairs and downstairs and run them, via ethernet backhaul) with a single SSID as I do at home, as the Apple stuff seems to work quite well together.
Sigh. Old well built houses and their wifi killing structure!
So... This ran like this for a while until recently when apparently the internet/wifi stopped working. After the usual "turn it off and on again" didn't solve the issue, apparently one of the lodgers (I wasn't able to get over there to deal with it at the time) took it upon themselves to call the ISP to try and sort it out. I had said in the past not to try and describe the network set up as I knew TalkTalk wouldn't a) be able to fathom it out and b) not support it anyway, and I was right - on both counts. They insisted only one hub should be in use, and then told the lodger to press and hold the reset button which of course wiped out any IP reserving I had and DHCP rules. Anyway, following the ISP's "tech guru's" instructions it was set up with two SSID's, one for 2.4ghz and one for 5ghz, and the upstairs router/AP was left out the equation. Turns out the issue wasn't the hub, it was the broadband supply having a day or so of being wonky, so all the above could have been avoided, but it was enough for me to tire of having two consumer grade POS hubs work against each other, so I talked to my mother about me redoing her entire network. My original plan was to put Apple networking equipment in, since that's what I use and, despite it being outdated, under specced and discontinued, my network has been rock solid for years and years and works fine, plus it's so east to administer since it can all be done from an iOS app. I decided against it for a couple reasons: I was going to put an Airport Extreme in downstairs, se the hub to modem only, connect it to the Extreme via ethernet and then use the backhaul cable to hook up an Airport Express upstairs, which has both a WAN and LAN (for passthrough) so I could pipe internet upstairs for the Express to put out as Wifi and pass through the LAN port to a point in another bedroom (for a static PC). Simple. I decided against it for two reasons: 1) downstairs there are 4 ethernet requirements and the Extreme only has 3 LAN (and one WAN) so I'd be short one connection, and 2) the Express doesn't have gigabit ethernet, only 10/100. Not a huge deal breaker as her broadband is roughly 37 Mbps, and no one in the house is doing heavy internal network traffic, so gigabit isn't hugely necessary, but I was thinking of future proofing.
So... After looking around I decided to go for a Ubiquiti UniFi UAP as the sole WAP: turn the wifi off on the TalkTalk hub, and have the UAP supply just a single SSID (dual band for both 2.4 and 5ghz) that everyone can use. Supposedly, the UniFi UAP's are very good for that, and the PoE made positioning much easier since it didn't need mains power running to where I wanted it. So I decided to mount it on the underside of the hallway ceiling in pretty much the most central point of the house with the infrastructure being:
Hub > backhaul upstairs > Netgear GS105 switch. The GS105 then feeds a cat 6 run a second bedroom and the PoE injector for the UAP. Nodal point is in the upstairs landing cupboard > cat6 from the PoE to the UAP. Simple.
See crude diagram
Everything installed as I wanted it to, I did all my own terminations and punch downs, made up patch cables etc (all tested and running at full speed, so I know I used 568B on everything) and then came the UAP power on (I'd already set it up and configured the SSID, password, etc) at home before installing. Powered on, my laptop (upstairs) connected and it ran great: about 32/33 Mbps on a speed test. My phone, that couldn't even see the TalkTalk hub's 5ghz network upstairs connected with full reception bars. Great! The downstairs front room, when my mum tutors online showed good solid connection too. But this is where it went wrong: the kitchen (which has a middle room between it and the hallway where the UAP is) showed drastically slower link speed than the TalkTalk hub, and in the garden my phone dropped the connection. Using the WifiSweetSpot app I was seeing 359 Mbps (average) link speed between the TalkTalk hub (5ghz) and my phone but only 100 Mbps when connected to the UAP. Granted the TalkTalk hub was only 8 feet away in (almost) line of sight (only a wooden room divider between) and the UAP was roughly 25/30 feet away but I have a feeling the load bearing wall between the UAP and where I was sitting is killing the signal. It's only a couple foot deep from the ceiling (above the doorway) but it's 9 thick brick with old school lime plaster either side, and the UAP wifi has to pass through it rather than go through the open door below it. Couple that with then having to go through an outside wall to the garden, it just couldn't handle it. Annoying, since the UAP I bought as the AC-LR (long range) and it has a 3x3 MIMO antenna config that's supposed to be high output. But whilst the upstairs is better off than it was, the downstairs (on the whole) is worse...
So now I'm stuck what to do. I don't particularly want to have both the TalkTalk hub and the UAP serving wifi, as it kinda defeats the purpose of having the UAP in a central location and I could just put a lower power Express upstairs as a WAP, and run both the hub and Express together (as I did before with the two TalkTalk hubs), or even put an Express both upstairs and downstairs and run them, via ethernet backhaul) with a single SSID as I do at home, as the Apple stuff seems to work quite well together.
Sigh. Old well built houses and their wifi killing structure!