My family owns a good sized grocery store and we need to start over with our wireless networks… The store is about 12,000sqft of retail space, not including the back hall and upstairs (both approx 150’ length and 30’-40’ width. The building is all solid concrete with lots of steel beams. We are considering adding 4-5x of the UniFi E7 Campus APs, all hardwired to our main network running pfSense. Though we do not need anything close to 1,000 active users, we need to find the best solution that works well in this type of congested environment. I’m drawn to the E7 Campus because of the PRISM active RF filtering. Does it actually work? Does the UniFi stuff still work well as a “Mesh” or Seamless Roaming solution when hardwired?
The goal is to give a somewhat seamless connection across these APs which I know can be device dependent in a lot of cases. Attached is a picture from the upstairs on a balcony. I wanted to have 1x AP here, and another on the opposite side of the store above the front office seen below. This is approximately 150’ away and both will be hardwired. I can run another wire to the center of the store for another one if needed. We would then have 1x AP in the back hall, centered and another upstairs, also centered.
We really don’t have that many wireless users as we do not offer a “guest” network. This network is just for scales and price scanners used for price changes or placing orders, along with a few employee phones/devices.
What are the best APs for congested spaces? We have a few hundred customers in the store at any given time, all with a hot spot running and several other wireless devices broadcasting in the area.
Any suggestions? I’ve also looked at the Meraki and Aruba stuff… What else should I consider? I don’t want to say that money is no object, but really, we just need it to work. We have no problem spending the money if it truly is a better solution for this application. Our demands are not crazy, just crowded/congested.
Any and all input or suggestions would be much appreciated… Thanks!
Hey welcome! You also probably ask friend of the channel and YouTuber Lawrence Systems as he focuses on more Enterprise side of things and we are a more general enthusiast channel. We probably have more users but they have a more focused userbase, I guess.
Personally I have no recommendations per se. I’ve only used Mikrotik AP at home and they are also in the same Enterprise realm of providing networking equiptment as Unify/Ubiquiti. I’ve heard price and to fine tune settings are being one of its pros with cons being that the interface leaves a lot to be desired because it exposes ALL of the settings for you to tinker with but only a few hints to go around if you dont know what you are doing.
Yes, you will have seamless client roaming with hardwired APs. However, I would be hesitant to rely on a handful of super high end APs in that environment. Those WiFi appliance things tend to have terrible radios and antennae. You often need to nerf your WiFi networks with compatibility modes to get them to connect reliably.
For that space, maybe start with 3 hardwired E7 Campus APs, then distribute U6 Mesh points as needed through the aisles.
Alternatively, keep throwing hardwired U6-LRs at the problem until you have the space covered.
Yes, PRISM filtering they have works. I dont understand all the extremely technical details, but it converts the wifi frequency into a far lower frequency and then converts it back into wifi frequency again. By doing this it eliminates the majority of interference. As to the how, IDK, but such conversion filtering has been done for decades and decades with great success. I think these would work extremely well in your environment. Here is the official article on it but it contains little more info than what I already posted: https://blog.ui.com/article/introducing-enterprise-7-wifi
The APs also work perfectly well with seamless roaming.
An important factor is the mounting location and direction the AP is pointing. Where you took the picture from looks like a good height to mount these at, pointing acros and slightly down towards the ground floor. Mounting the E7 Camput on the ceiling pointing straight down would not be a good application for them. The E7 Campus has directional antennas, not omni ones like ceiling APs have. Also be aware these are powered by PoE++ and use 45w of power each. You will want a switch with large power capacity for deploying these. Id recommend the Pro XG 10G that is about to release: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/usw-pro-xg-10-poe
You will likely want a hardware controller to run them, so you have active logging of traffic. Since you are running pfsense as your router you should get a Cloud Key Gen2+ SSD for this job.
These are great! possibly better for your business environment even, but watch out for the subscription fees required which are quite large. The advantage to Unifi is that it provides great performance and just about every feature in an easy to use interface, with no subscription fees required unless you are doing larger scale, multi-site user management.
Seamless roaming is a fairly outdated concept which is why you won’t see it mentioned in product details of any of these systems. These old seamless roaming methods were always pretty hacky and modern WiFi performs much better which has made it unnecessary.
Roaming is entirely client side and all roaming decisions are made by the client device so the best thing you can do to facilitate good roaming is have good coverage. There are some technologies in the APs like fast roaming that will help improve roaming perfromamce but it’s still all up the to client device. A lot of ‘smart’ devices have awful roaming logic like connecting to APs based on their channel order without considering signal quality, and this can’t be resolved by the APs.
I totally get that for sure and it’s why I mentioned that I know it’s device dependent in most cases… That’s why I’m curious which APs do the best job at it. You can have all the coverage possible and it won’t matter if the device or client doesn’t hop to the stronger AP or isn’t forced to roam/hop. Does UniFi fast roaming work better than others?
Roaming to a stronger AP is a decision made entirely by the client, the network has no control over it. You can force a client to change AP by disconnecting it but that’s not ideal. Fast roaming is a standard, I’m not sure if unifi’s implementation is better or worse than others but it really only matters when using RADIUS, particularly when the RADIUS server is on the cloud or slow to authenticate for some reason. Regular WPA authentication on modern devices is fast enough that roaming won’t cause an interruption in most cases, and older devices won’t support fast roaming anyway.
I suppose my point is that getting good roaming performance has more to do with network design than any technology, which all modern APs will support anyway. The old proprietary seamless roaming systems are long gone.
Ok how seamless does the roaming need to be? There is no true seamless roaming.
I have a Unifi setup with 2 U6E ap’s that are hardwired and while the roaming is mostly seamless, it was not out of the box and took some tweaking, and there are quite a few gotchas i have found and came up with solutions for.
This being said the unfi setup has been way better at roaming than my previous wifi setup.
Not true, part of 802.11r ap’s can hint to clients to roam to a new ap. Unifi devices also have a feautre to drop devices when their signal strenght gets low enough to force them to roam to another ap, or just to a differnent frequency(5ghz->2.4ghz). This bypasses a device having to need 802.11r or having good roaming settings, to make devices roam.
I would also suggest relying only on 802.11r for creating your seamless roaming experience is a recipe for disaster.
Being able to adjust radio power, signal strength cutoff, and ability to lock devices to aps, help with a better experience.
Network planing is what would tie all of this together.
Yes they can encourage the clients to change AP and inform them of nearby APs to make the process smoother, but it’s still up to the client. Dropping the connection isn’t roaming. What I am saying is that WiFi roaming on modern devices is seamless out of the box and doesn’t require any special hardware or configuration. There are various things which improve the perfromance but ultimately the design of the network is what will determine how well your roaming works. Things like laptops and phones are pretty smart but they will still hang on to a connection for too long (usually around - 75db) so it’s important not to have too much overlap, but dumber devices can have really stupid roaming logic where they’ll connect to something with a weak signal simply because it’s the next on the list. There’s not really anything you can do about that from the network side.
Not to argue semantics but yes it is, just a taking a different definition of roaming. Your still forcing the device to “roam” between access points even if its a hacky way of doing it.
Yes it should, but what im saying is it most defiantly does not. 802.11r has been around since 2008. 802.11r is the part of the wifi standard that governs how devices roam between access points. i can tell you while most modern devices support it, just because all your devices are using the standard does not mean you will have seamless roaming.
I would hazard a guess that the current access points in the op’s grocery store probably all ready support 802.11r. If so, and assuming their placed adequately for what they are. Then using no other technology they should not expect any better roaming than what they currently have.
Again why would Ubiquity put the features and effort into all these other things if 802.11r “just worked”. Also im in now way implying Ubiquity is the only one doing these things, im aware of other vendors doing similar things.
