I'm in search of suggestions for products to create a home wifi mesh.
I'm buying a 2 Story 2,500sq.ft home in the next month. My current gear couldn't cover my old 2 Story 1,300sq.ft home adequately.
My current equipment is as follows: Motorola / Arris SB6141 Surfboard Cable Modem ASUS RT-N66u NetGear 8 Port Gb Switch
I know that the following companies create mesh gear: Google WiFi, Ubiquity, Netgear, eero & luma.
I'd like the flexibility of a product that can mesh both wired, and wirelessly. (Quick dirty setup now, proper setup later)
Is there harm in setting up multiple consumer APs with the same SSID? Is this not the same as a mesh?
My plan is to deploy 2 or 3 APs on the 2nd story of my home, as I believe this is considered best practice. Possibly adding a 4th to the center of the main story as well.
A mesh in the sense you are describing is not a real mesh, but is a pretty standard multiple AP setup. With multiple AP's you need to set them up so that clients can "roam" from one AP to the next. You can do that with consumer grade gear, if you have a router with custom firmware, DD-WRT, pfsense, tomatoe, things like that. If you want to make your life easy though, just pick up a couple of commercial AP's, they are soooooooooooo worth it.
Since the house is still empty, running ethernet is the first thing you should do. Don't bother with wireless repeaters or WDS. Ethernet is still king.
No, not at all. Just make sure that the access points are spread across channels 1, 6 and 11 on the 2.4GHz band. For the 5GHz band, automatic channel selection is fine most of the time.
If you go with a dedicated setup: don't forget to turn off the wireless on your cable modem.
You want to focus on the areas where most wireless devices will reside.
Depending on the construction of the walls and the layout of the house, I'd start with two on the first floor, and one in the downstairs living room. Mount the AP's on the ceiling (or high up on a wall) for optimal reception.
Let's start with the ones that I don't recommend: - Google WiFi: Closed down proprietary solution, main selling point is ease of use (for the clueless consumer). Not really my thing. - Netgear: Depends on the product range, the consumer stuff ranges form crap to mediocre. - Eero: Mostly buzzwords, again focused on ease of use. - Luma: Same as eero, though less expensive.
And now the ones that I do: - Ubiquiti: You can hardly go wrong with this one: solid hardware for a good price. Power over ethernet makes installation a breeze. They can be centrally managed and performance is excellent. Not much harder to configure than a consumer product. - Mikrotik: Offers similar products as Ubiquiti at similar price points. Mikrotik packs more features, at the cost of sleek looks and ease of use. This gear is definitely not aimed towards networking rookies, but it can do amazing stuff if you have the know-how.
Ubiquiti's access points are really good for what you need. Stick them somewhere where the signal can reach everywhere in the house. You really should only need one to reach the bits of your house that your router can't get to.
Ethernet will be ran as needed. Wiring the upstairs is easiest due to access to the attic. Running any amount of Ethernet downstairs will be a nightmare. (No crawl space)
I was leaning toward Ubiquity. Their product stack is pretty dense. Was going to grab a PoE switch, and 2 of their AP Pros to start with. Do I need one of their Routers? Can I skimp and save a few dollars and use my RT-N66u for DHCP & Routing for the time being?
You don't need a new router, the RT-N66U is a solid enough router for most needs (though I suggest installing the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware for a few extra tweaks).
The AP PRO is a very solid access point for 802.11n, but I'd consider their 802.11ac access points for "future proofness".
You don't really need a PoE switch for just two access points, all single-pack Ubiquiti AP's come with a PoE injector in the box (the multi packs don't have them included).
Tip: make a proper networking diagram on Draw.io, it can help you with future troubleshooting.
I plan on dedicating one port on the router to a VLAN to deploy a game/voice/email server at some point next year.
The router port driving the Gigabit switch will be on a separate VLAN as well. This is to ensure I'm masking them from the otherwise publicly available Game Server. Should the Ubiquiti APs go on the same switch driving the Desktops/Console? Or their own switch on a 3rd VLAN? (I'm very used to branching tree in my corporate environment.) One of the desktops pulls double duty as being my Plex Server.
For a home network, there is no real benefit in having the wireless access points separated from the rest.
By default, the Merlin-firmware has all the VLANs bridged together. Some additional tweaking is required to make the separation for the game server work the way you want.
If that fails, I suggest going with something like a Mikrotik RB2011 (or Edgerouter Lite). It has all the features you're looking for, at only a few watts of power consumption.
I generally don't recommend virtualization for a router/firewall, it adds unnecessary complexity to your networking setup (and may affect security if done incorrectly).
This is what my home network looks like:
The separation between private and public devices is exactly what you want.
