New house network build (recommendations)

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rcfant89

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Oct 6, 2011
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I recently got a new house and want to set up a great network here. Right now I'm using the standard all in one rental from TWC but I plan on buying a stand alone modem and then connecting that to my wireless networking solution for better coverage, performance, and to not pay an equipment rental fee forever.

Here's my setup:

Ranch style home, ~2500 sq/ft.
Finished basement, 2 rooms and small hallway, directly below master and other bedroom. (Thick concrete walls here)
Garage/warehouse type metal building about 40 yards from the house ~600-700 sq/ft

I am an IT guy so not worried about setup complexity. I'm just looking for a product recommendation. I've been looking at the ubiquiti, google wifi, and eero mesh solutions. I read good things about the eero but it's a little expensive and doesn't do POE.

I bought a 1000 ft cat 6 box to wire my house up with and would like to have one cat 6 line to each AP and that's it, no power cords preferably.

I want to run all the cat 6 back to a patch panel and plug them into my 24 port gigabit poe adtran switch.

I've got a dell PowerEdge server with file shares and media (blu ray video I would like to stream, among other things) so I'd like to have AC access points.

I'm thinking one AP towards one side of the house, one AP towards the other side in the basement and one in the garage/building. I have a pipe running to that building but fishing a cat 6 line to it *may* be tricky since it seems pretty full of cable as it is, plus it has power lines in it so I am thinking the power will cause interference. I'm not sure if it would render it unusable to be minor, I'd be interested to see.

Anyway, what wireless product would you recommend for this? I care about performance, POE, and price. Don't really care about ease of setup, extra features, etc. Thanks.



 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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May 29, 2013
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Since you can run POE, I would recommend either Engenius or Ubiquiti. Some might recommend Ruckus.
If you need to feed to a building that you can't run wire to, I would get a pair of 5Ghz directional WIFI bridge units like the Engenius ENS500.

Again, since you can run ethernet, there is no reason to use mesh. Just use standard APs. If you want to get fancy, then setup guest SSIDs on a separate VLAN back to the managed switch.
 
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boosted1g

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Go with ubiquiti APs, no to google or eero.
I have been nothing but satisfied with my ASUS RT-AC68P router flashed with asus merlin. If you dont have some higher end commercial grade router already then I would suggest this plus your APs.

If doable I would just bury a conduit the 40ft to bring ethernet to the workshop and then have an AP connected to that instead of dealing with trying to pickup wifi from house to workshop.

Dont bother with trying to setup having 1 SSID across all your APs because without a commercial distribution server to control what device connects to what AP your devices will keep disconecting because for 3 seconds it sees a bogus power reading that the far AP is a better signal.
 
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rcfant89

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We have Ruckus we use here at the office and they are fantastic but last time I checked, they were super expensive (for personal use). Ours are enterprise grade, I guess I can check if they have a cheaper consumer grade option.

I'll probably do a guest and standard vlan and maybe a voip vlan as well.



So what are you saying? Have 3 different SSIDs? That seems like a bad solution, as does having to deal with disconnects. That's why I was leaning towards the mesh network APs because I read they don't have those issues. What do you think?

I just want a single SSID with good coverage in the house, the basement, and the workshop. I'd prefer to run Cat6 to each AP but I don't have to I guess.
 
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boosted1g

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Whether it is a mesh network or individual APs the disconnects are still going to be there because your device is going to auto-connect to the AP/node with the hightest signal. If you are in the middle of 2 nodes then you can expect to see this signal level flutuate a lot and cause the device to do frequent disconnects.

Commercial applications have a controller that regulates when roaming devices switch to another AP, without the controller this duty is put back onto the mobile devices which typically do a poor job at this.

You can certianly try the single SSID in your setup, it really comes down to the distance between APs and how good or bad the devices are at managing their connection. If you do have many disconnects though then you will need to have different SSIDs (at least for the indoor APs).
Also make sure your APs are on non-conflicting wifi channels.
 
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rcfant89

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That makes sense. I was planning on having a controller. I was thinking I could just run a VM (I have a poweredge server running anyway with file shares, etc). I also noticed the Ubiquiti Unifi Cloud Key looks like it'd be good.

So you think the ubiquiti pros?
 
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