We have a large Pole Barn 54’ wide and 84’ long and 16’ tall. It’s split into two separate areas or sections with a common metal clad studded wall.
We need each area/section to have a good WIFI Access Point for signal strength, but both routers to share Access point names/passwords for seamless movement between the two areas.
Each area/section has wired shared Ethernet connectivity.
What would you recommend and not brake the bank?
Thanks,
Will
Hi!!!
Some affordable options to consider include:
It’s important to note that the actual performance of these systems may depend on the specific conditions of your building and the number of devices connected to the network.
Access point in each area? e.g. one unifi u6-pro in each section?
ChristianMorris, Thanks, Good options, but the “quoted” range may be an issue, and the larger area is 54*48, so a ceiling mounted unit will need to be rated to cover a rated 4,400 sq.ft.
Risk, Yes looking to ceiling mount a unit in each area and connect them together thru the Cat 6 Network cabling.
PS I like the Access Point U6 Enterprise, good future proofing, but a little more expensive than I liked. Not sure if it supports a Mesh Network.
You don’t need to care about “mesh” (as marketing people call it), since you have a wired LAN as a “backhaul” whatever you get will just have to be able to work in “access point mode”. You’re unlikely to use wireless mesh or wireless “uplink”.
U6 Enterprise AP supports WiFi 6E , which some fancy high end devices can take advantage of, and it means that you’d get around 1.5Gbps of throughput in some cases instead of topping out at 700-800.
It’s strictly technically a higher end device, but a bit of a waste of money unless you know what you need it for - unless you need it for a specific purpose.
Most devices people carry with them aren’t going to be able to take advantage of it, or people won’t care (e.g. phones downloading stuff at 160MB/s as opposed to 80MB/s … outside of an occasional Genshin update generally nobody cares; laptops will do their thing and chug along in the background at trickle rate speeds).
What’s your use case? How many clients will you have and what do you expect them to do?
Depending on your answer it might be interesting to look into perhaps two APs per each area if you’re turning the barn into an office/working space, or into a conference venue and expect to have e.g. 200-300 devices connected from each section simultaneously.
Risk, Thanks, they only reason I was looking at the Mesh was my understanding that they can handle the same SSID/PW hand off between access points better, but if that’s not the case, simple two good long range coverage units should work.
We only have 1GB Fiber to the facility, so yea the Pro is overkill, was only considering it to address the better/newer Wifi6 connection.
As for the number of clients, likely only a half dozen at a time in one area, and a mix of phone and tablets, as the PC’s are hard wired to the network.
We appreciate any recommendations and Thank you for the insights.
The Grandstream GWN7660 costs ~60% of an Ubiquiti with same specs.
It runs as a controller and can manage 50 other Grandstream devices or you can do cloud management. They don’t come with PoE injectors but I imagine you will want a PoE switch.
While not as established as Ubiquiti the Grandstream products are killer bang for the buck. I’ve deployed them at multiple locations and never had any issues that weren’t my own fault. A nice thing about them is that they come with an extra ethernet port that can be VLAN tagged for your random IOT device/TV/daisy chaining ethernet.
using U6 Pro’s, looks like coverage would be ok - but that’s based on them being placed at the 16 foot height.
I wonder if the 16’ tall refers to the wall height or underside of ridge?
Those GWN7660 APs have roughly the specs of the U6 Lite (GWN7660 is same 5g bandwidth but better 2.4g bandwidth), and costs the same as them. They are not even remotely close to the U6 pro which they are 60% the cost of (1.2gbps vs 4.8gbps).
The local (northern EU) supplier here has the U6 Pro listed as 2.4 gbps, must be on one radio. At those prices the U6 is a better deal.
Edit: For reference the U6 lite is listed at ~150USD.
Guys, again Thanks. I’ve not yet pulled the trigger, sorry, but down to the two following ideas/options:
Ubiquiti - UniFi 6 Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US)
EnGenius Fit Wi-Fi 6 4×4 Indoor Wireless Access Point (EWS377-FIT)
Your Thoughts?
first one.
Main difference between Engenius and Ubiquiti is the software
If you throw in similarly priced u6-pro in the mix temporarily you’ll see something comparable to 377 in terms of raw specs.
The 377, and the u6-pro are both based on ipq50. They support 802.11ax (aka wifi 6) on 2.4GHz, but it’s dubious which client devices can really take advantage of it… They also support 160MHz wide channels on 5GHz with the similar problem of it being sometimes supported and rarely making a useful difference (800 vs. 940 Mbps over wifi … how often do you need it in the first place).
U6-LR, on the other hand is based on MTK7622 which has waaay better open source support at the moment (if you want to throw all your toys out of the pram and use OpenWRT, with U6-LR you can). You have that escape hatch - the device will probably be running the latest Linux kernel 15years from now in some shape or form.
Engenius multi-ap management is less mature… and you’re probably less likely to consider other Engenius products like switches, and other access points, so if you’re picking an ecosystem - Ubiquiti has historically been a more decent option.
What are you thinking for routing, pfSense on a protectli or one of those 6x2.5G alder lake small PCs?
My final installation includes a Dream Machine and a U6-LR. It has worked great and has fixed all the issues we had, and I’ve even added a camera to the system.
If the Dream Machine would GbE RJ45 WAN port would work at a full Gig, and not top out at 700 Mbs, I’d even lily add the same setup to our home and fix it’s WiFi woes as well.
Thanks for the help.
Glad to hear it worked for you!
Yeah if you have access to gig+ wan Unifi routing products are not a good solution. I have deployed them for many businesses and homes that have connections in the range of 10Mb-300Mb and they work just fine.
It is sad that their non pro line have CPUs that top out at 700mbps. I really wish they should update the standard Dream machine to be capable of running the 2gb internet that has become cheap now days. Most homes dont really want to mount a rack somewhere and run that type of hardware, they want a little all in one they can stick behind a picture somewhere. Unfortunately it seems Ubiquiti is moving away from the standard home place and trying to push more into businesses and even enterprise.
Glad to hear your barn setup is doing really well though.
