As you can see, on the wired side of the network i’m more than well covered, even better than the place where i work at.
My current wave of doubt resides on the wireless side of the network, as this is a big, old house with thick walls and a single AP is not going to cut it.
I hooked my system up for testing with my Asus RT-AC1200 router set in AP mode. I was quite happy with its performance, transfering files through the network on wireless was no big deal for it, my HEOS system loved it, even heavy 4k files were no big deal, so i’m going to keep this one as an AP.
I calculated that 3 of these should be enough to cover the whole house, the garage and part of the back and front yard. So, should i buy more RT-AC1200s or should i buy dedicated wireless APs?
This TP-Link and the Ubiquiti AC Lite @sanfordvdev suggested are right at my ballpark, as is the Asus.
I’ll probably pick up this TP-Link one, its a little bit cheaper than the Ubiquiti and it wouldn’t look out of place on the wall, thanks for the suggestions!
I suggest for reliability and performance sake go Ubiquiti. I have been through so many routers and AP and Ubuiquiti just works and works better than the rest.
Can’t say i had any problems with TP-Link all these years, but indeed, Ubiquiti is very well regarded when it comes to features and reliability, maybe if i get a deal on a pair of Ubiquities i’ll pick them up…
Oh, in My country the price isn’t that different from Lite, but yes, Lite is Als a very good option, but it also depends on how big the house is? Og you need two Lite ap’s to cover it All, the LR option might save you some bucks sine it Can cover more ground
Well, the stores here have a 7 day return policy, maybe i could pick one up and test if it can surpass the walls, it would save me some bucks for sure…
What you need is a dedicated VLAN for all of your vulnerable IoT devices, so that when they eventually get powned, the bad guys won’t have access to everything under the sun.
VLANs are an yet uncharted territory for me, but like you said, my IoT devices (especially the IP cameras) need some sort of protection, so i’ll research it thoroughly, thanks for the tip!
pfSense supports VLANs out of the box. I see no mention of VLAN support for your preferred switches. You will also need either dedicated access points, or access points which also support VLANS, such as the various Ubiquiti UniFi access points. The Ubiquiti AP AC Lite is a crowd favorite because of its price/performance ratio.
The wonderful thing about the Ubiquiti is the management. It’s totally centralized. You can add as many APs as you want and you manage them all from the same place, and all their settings propagate automagically. They also support VLANs and more enterprise-ish stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing (not sure if the TPlink support that or not).
If you just need a cheap AP that “works” and you’re only ever going to have one AP, you’re probably fine with TP Link. But if you want expandability and rock solid reliability along with some fun enterprise stuff to play with/learn on, I cannot recommend Ubiquiti highly enough.
When we spoke about pfSense for the first time (about making it on a Dell Optiplex 380, which evolved into me using my spare i5-3470 and a motherboard from Aliexpress), i said i was going to precisely that with my old TP-Link WR841N, but that one just isn’t enough anymore.
I was thinking about installing openWRT on my RT-AC1200, but there doesn’t seem to be any releases for it just yet, so for the start i’ll just use the standard AP mode built in the original ROM.
Hmm, all things considered the Ubiquiti APs seem to be the best option so far, and just for the fact that i can manage both APs from the same place would be very handy.
I think i’ll try them out, just need to sort a few things out in the house before i can buy the new networking toys, thank you guys!
