Finally upgraded my home wifi to something that works - managed wifi review
After struggling to get simple wifi in the house over the years, I finally started researching some of the new cheaper enterprise grade wifi solutions for the house to put silly wifi issues behind me. But before I go into the details, here's a recap of what I've done over the years.
Years ago, I started off with a single wifi access point. My house isn't massive, it's fairly open, but for whatever reason, 2.4ghz wifi is terrible in the house. 5Ghz is pretty good, but it has problems going through more than 3 walls/floors or 1 pane of glass, so there were deadspots all over the house. So this solution sucked ass.
To fix that problem, I dropped access points (basically routers with the routing portion disabled) throughout the house. I used the same SSID so that I can simply connect to 1 SSID for 2.4, and another for 5Ghz. The problem here is that roaming doesn't work. If I come in through the garage, it connects to the one beside the mudroom, and by the time I'm upstairs, it's still stuck connected to that access point. Everything is slow, videos buffer, and I have to turn off wifi, turn it back on in hopes that it connects to the closest one. Doesn't always happen.
So to fix THAT problem, I set individual ssid's for each of those APs. So now, if I'm in the bedroom and wifi sucks, I just connect to the bedroom one. Problem solved. Too bad it's annoying as fuck always going to wifi settings to manually choose the right access point. While that works well once it's setup, setting up new devices is a PITA. Have to go around the house and connect to 10 different SSIDs, remember the password, to make it easy. Couldn't get any better at this point, as I've reached the end of the road with consumer grade wifi.
I've looked into enterprise grade gear, but at $1k+ an AP on average, it was way too expensive for the house. Thankfully over the last year, new setups have come out where it's actually priced close to consumer grade gear. A couple of us at work went with different setups to tackle the same problem, so here's what we've tested. We only focused on AC setups:
1. Eero $499USD for 3 APs - https://www.eero.com/
This is some new kickstarter funded setup, and it makes setting up good wifi with seamless roaming so easy that anyone can set this up. Plug in the main unit into your modem (standard setup) or LAN (bridged advanced setup), load up the app on your phone, and it's online. After that, you just plug in the remaining APs to power, and it'll connect to the main one over wifi in a mesh setup.
So Eero is purely a wireless mesh setup, meaning that all the new APs connect to each other to stretch the signal through the home. It supports seamless roaming and fast handoff via 802.11r so once the signal drops enough to the AP you're connected to, it'll disconnect and connect to the new AP without skipping a beat. The bad thing about this setup is that when you connect to one of the wireless meshed APs, you lose 1/2 your bandwidth. Hit another AP that's connected to another wireless AP, another half gone.
There's also issues with the routing portion of it if you don't bridge and use your own router. Port forwarding is flaky, and it's terrible for gaming consoles because UPnP isn't working well.
2. Ubiquiti UniFi AC Pro $149USD per AP - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-pro/
On the other end of the spectrum, the UniFi setup is fairly low cost, but requires a bit of tech knowhow to get things going. You need to setup the controller software on a server at home (if you don't want access to stats you don't need to keep it running), and each AP needs to be wired to your LAN. It does support wireless uplinks (kinda like mesh, but manual) but it's kinda flaky from what I've seen.
You can setup multiple SSIDs, one for you, one for guests, and can even setup hotel style landing pages for guests so that they use vouchers or paypal to pay for internet access. Roaming works well, but it's not enabled out of the box. You need to set it up properly otherwise each AP acts like the consumer grade multiple AP setup. It doesn't use 802.11k/r (support coming soon) and works by detecting signal strength of the clients, and booting them off if they don't meet a set strength threshold so it reconnects to a stronger AP.
I can write a whole ton more on this setup, but you can read the Ars Technica review which covers absolutely everything.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...wi-fi-gear-is/
3. Open Mesh/Cloudtrax $225USD per AP - http://www.open-mesh.com/ (update - new OM5P-AC available at $135)
As of December 31, 2018, Open-Mesh will no longer sell as one time cost, and will switch to a recurring payment model via Datto Networks who purchased them. It basically costs your purchase price every 2 years, as such I can not recommend them any further.
This is the setup that I ended up with. It slots somewhere in between Eero and UniFi. It relies on Cloudtrax for management so you don't have to run anything at home. It's free, the APs come with a perpetual license for Cloudtrax.
Setup is fairly easy, register for your free account on cloudtrax.com, create a new network, and add each AP via mac address on the sticker. After that, plug each AP in, it'll contact the cloudtrax servers, download the configs and that's it.
There's a lot of functionality that this setup offers. You can wire each AP in turning it into a gateway, or just plug in power and it becomes a repeater in a mesh network much like Eero. I only used gateway mode for all my APs since I have Ethernet through the house and it performs better without mesh traffic.
Seamless roaming works great, there's nothing to configure, and it's proprietary so I have no clue how it actually works under the hood. If I'm in 1 room, it will connect using the best protocol (AC). As I move around and signal drops, it'll drop down to a 2.4Ghz channel if there's not a strong enough 5Ghz signal in between APs. Sit around for a minute, and it flips it back to 5Ghz.
There are some limitations in simplicity. There's a limit of 4 SSID's, but really for a home setup you don't need any more. As I mentioned, no configs at all for tweaking roaming, but there's radio power settings for tweaking coverage. You can run it in bridge mode (your network dishes out DHCP) or you can run it in a more private mode where the APs act as a router and NAT some private addresses. If you use Sonos, AppleTV etc that relies on LAN broadcasts, you should use bridge mode. There's also full on bandwidth throttling, very useful for guests.
So yea, all 3 solutions solves the biggest problem in a home wifi network. Tons of coverage through multiple APs, and seamless roaming so that you never connect to a far away and slow AP. One final note, both open mesh and unifi promises 802.11k/r support this year, which is a better way to manage seamless roaming as the client device can choose the AP with the best signal strength/throughout and roam all on its own. Eero only supports r, which speeds up handoff but doesn't rely on client device to initiate the roam. For the techies, here's Cisco's demo of r/k vs AP initiated roaming:
http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/wi-fi-roaming-101
TL;DR: Consumer grade wifi sucks. Enterprise grade wifi setups fixes coverage and deadzones, and allows seamless roaming between APs to ensure your device always connects to the strongest access point. 3 setups were evaluated:
1. Eero.
Pros
- easy as fuck to setup
- not terrible expensive
- cloud managed. no software to setup.
Cons
- no advanced features for techies
- still buggy. port forwarding, and uPnP is still flaky
- mesh only, performance degradation on wireless APs
2. UniFi
Pros
- cheapest of all 3 setups
- very advanced options
- tons of stats to see what devices are doing
Cons
- need to run your own wifi controller (only for initial setup, guest portal, and stats)
- need some tech experience and wifi knowhow to setup
- not easy setting up APs with no ethernet
- need to setup seamless roaming manually. Not setup by default.
3. Open Mesh
Pros
- can run wireless (mesh) or wired APs
- fairly simple to setup
- cloud managed. no software to setup.
Cons
As of December 31, 2018, Open-Mesh will no longer sell as one time cost, and will switch to a recurring payment model via Datto Networks who purchased them. It basically costs your purchase price every 2 years, as such I can not recommend them any further.
- most expensive of the 3
- doesn't have as much advanced features as UniFi
Update:
Update 2:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
rage2
Open Mesh was acquired by Datto a while back, and starting Jan 1st will move to a monthly subscription model. All existing open mesh purchases prior to Dec 31st 2018 will still have the perpetual one time purchase license, which lets the APs be used and managed free of charge under CloudTrax. Cloudtrax is expected to EOL in 5 years, pretty much past the lifecycle of current 802.11ac.
Looks like Ubiquiti is the clear winner now, at least until they move to a sub model at some point haha.
