Howdy Bit-Techies , I'm after some advice having gone from a small 3bed house which was just about covered by my Apple Airport to a large house 2.5x the size of my old one which is killing the airport in terms of wifi coverage and speed also would like some wifi in the garden which is a no no at the moment lol. I've done my useall googling but want to make sure what I've short listed will do the job and also up for some recomendations of experience people have had. Options 1. Google Wifi (3 pack for the extra coverage or more if needed) 2. Netgear Orbi (similar situation as above) 3. Existing airport extreme & add express stations to boost the signal. 4. Standard router plus some access points (cheapest option I guess) So which of the above will give the best results, also if this helps it'll all be tied into some home automation, nest & Hue devices will be dotted around. Cheers in advance guys
Unifi. The Pro APs (UAP AC Pro) are what I use, and I can't fault them. My house is quite tall and thin and two APs cover it all, with an extra one for the garden. They are a little bit spendy, but the roaming between APs works brilliantly.
The way I did it was get a primary router with good cover and then use a home plug to stick up a secondary router with DHCP disabled. Works perfectly and costs were minimal.
I can't speak highly enough about the Unifi range, I installed many setups in satellite offices that didn't warrant expensive cisco kit and the performance has always been stellar. I liked the range so much I kitted my house out with it when a single router wasn't good enough any more. I have two AC Lite's in the house, along with the USG and PoE switch to go with them. I also find the coverage to be excellent, I've one AP at the front on the ground floor and one at the back on the second floor, whole house full signal on every device and into the garden too. I still have a useable connection at the bus stop 6 houses down
Option 3 or 4 is the best bet as it will double your coverage. As you are using non-apple devices I would go with some standard 1300-1750ac routers. For value I love tp-link products though the ones I get don't have English. They have a good UI and are easy to set up even if you can't read Chinese. As they are a configure once and forget kind of thing I have always been happy with their products.
Thank you everyone so far , This is aimed at both of you , looking into these, looks like I need to run POE cables from the router to each AP which shouldn't hopefully be an issue but if not is there a way of having them set to just boost the current wireless signal?
You will need to run cables, I have one of the lites and its fantastic, I get signal half way down the road
It's not the "best" option by any stretch - it's the cheapest and easiest. There are compromises when you're just using two vanilla routers alongside each other. The best option with using multiple APs is a proper mesh, like the Google or Unifi kit, but it costs.
Cost isn't my issue I haven't got endless pockets but the prices I've seen for the unifi seem ok to me, I want really good signal quality, speed and range I'll dig around the Unifi kit and try and get a kit together there routers threw me as they just look like switches rather then your normal lets make the router look nice jobby.
You can inject PoE at the AP end if you like - they come with mains PoE injectors, but it's no great shakes to make it PoE at the switch end I'm not sure you can set them up as a relay - you'll need to set up the Unifi software on a PC on the network (or a RPi, or use a Unifi Security Gateway), but the resultant performance (and handoff and mesh) is brilliant.
I too can't speak enough good things about the unifi products from ubiquity. I currently use 2 of the older UAP non-pro and wireless works flawlessly in my 2 story town house on all 3 levels. the UAP AC Lite are the successor the old UAP access points. I would keep in mind that the non-pro access points do not support standard POE but the 24v Passive POE so getting non pro's would require either using injectors or a ubiquity poe enabled switch.
Using a Linksys EA6350 here in a town house. I installed it in the office which is on the 1st floor at the back of the property, as our homehub was crapping out signal in the bedroom on 2nd floor. Not only do we have excellent coverage across the house, but our small garden has coverage, and across the road in my car ~30m. Not bad for sub £100 for all singing all dancing device.
