Access point upgrade/ Ubiquiti AP wall mounted?

In short, it’ve been a long time I was looking to redo the wireless in the house, and since now gigabyte internet, I can convince my dad to do the needed upgrade.

Right now, I have the Bell router as the wireless access point for the extension of the house, and the Asus RT-AC87U for the rest of the house. The Bell router has shitty wifi, so I want to deactivate its wireless access point and attached an AP to it.

I want to upgrade to wifi 6 at the same time, so I considered the ASUS AX6000 to replace the RT-AC87U and use the later for the AP of the extension, but the AX6000 is expensive, especially to be used only as an AP.

So my eyes turned to Ubiquiti, because I always wanted to get that gear. Getting two U6-LR would be interesting, but I’m wondering if there would a huge penalty to wall mount them? Both will be in the basement btw, because of how I was able to wire the house. Would it creates a lot of issue? Here’s a rough sketch of how they would be in the house. Or should I forget wifi6 and use Ubiquiti wall mount option?

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You know, someone on their own forum was in exactly the same pickle

https://community.ui.com/questions/Access-Point-Ceiling-Wall-Mount/cb208f26-1d7a-401f-8094-147e0c271551

Hope that helps you

I’ve already seen it, but don’t find the answers helpful at all. I already know celling mounted is better, but want to know how much an impact wall mount as. Looking more of a “someone got a wall mounted ap and is able to get good signal for 15 meters in front it and 6 meters behind it” kind of exemple.

The only difference I can see wall mount vs ceiling mount making is that ceiling mount could make it easier to get a direct(or mostly direct) line of sight connection. I’m not an RF engineer, but I’d be surprised if there was any significant difference to signal quality depending only on what orientation the AP was mounted.

If you read through the original thread, you will see that these AP is designed to deliver a disc shaped coverage, kinda like a ufo beam of sort.

On top of that, they also mention in that thread that wifi coverage is super difficult to give a educated answer on, because everything from baby alarms, water pipes, electricity wires, wall thickness and lot lot more will affect how good the signal is on location - what works for one guy might not work for the next one

The last guy in the ubi thread say something like buy it at a place with return right, test it, and if it works for you keep it, if it dont then re-try with something else.

Its not to be a smart-a… its just impossible to really answer your questions as far as i see

Yeah I read that but I’m not sure I really buy it. If the “disc shaped” signal thing was true, then ceiling mount wouldn’t be any better since nobody uses their laptop on the ceiling.

So, I have a pair of U6-LR.

Here’s a result from my pixel 4 phone (2x2 802.11ac mu-mimo HT80 on ch.116 DFS 29dBm as per unifi controller) with me lying in my bed in my bedroom and with access point in a room underneath just sitting on a shelf on a tv bench pointing up. (so one floor up diagonally, maybe 5-6m away).

The construction between the floors is drywall+stick frame (joists+OSB sheeting+carpet).


I can try other orientations, buy not sure if it’ll be useful to your particular situation. I suspect I wouldn’t be getting a result as good if my external walls were more porous to letting various signals in.


You can make your own signal strength map, but a lot depends on mimo and noise and mimo likes having signal bounced around different paths.

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I used the analogy “ufo beam” because a disc dont really cuts it.

It should look something like this

I dont know exactly what AP this is from, but this should be pretty close to how the Ubi ones spread.
Looks little like a UFO (which is kinda disc shaped) and the yellow part look bit like the beam from a UFO, as seen in cartoons.

Point being, that the wifi is pretty weak near the AP, untill you have a little distance and it really kicks in and spreads. Thats why the ceiling, or floor (like in a TV stand near the floor) is ideal for these APs

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Also, thats 1 antenna, so the Ubi APs have more than 1, for full coverage around the circle

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