I currently have about 40 devices which are constantly falling off and rejoining the wifi. This is a TP-Link AX5400 plus a couple of other AC routers joined by the LAN ports. IP assignment is done only by the TP-Link.
The problem is that my 40 devices are too much for all of them to be present on the 2.4 GHz network at the same time. The client IP list is constantly changing which makes configuration very iffy. I expect the ultimate device load will be more like 75 and do not have confidence that this system will perform well.
What are the suggested wifi devices and configuration to achieve this goal?
Also, my $ resources are not huge, so I am willing to spend but not break the bank.
We live in a one story house in a typical Houston neighborhood.
Ubiquiti Unifi. You could just get a Security Gateway and however many AP’s it takes to cover your house. I have 2x long range AP’s that happily cover my 1001m2 property with double brick house.
My Fritz!Box modem with two additional Fritz!Box repeaters currently handles a MESH network of 48 devices constantly online and other 60 device’s moving in and out the house. The network is super stable, 99% uptime, the 1% is internet provider outage.
Inside the house not a single hick up in last 8 - 10 years.
So, if you ask me, Fritz!Box is a hero, on that machine my whole house stands…
Something you didn’t mention.
Where do you live, if it is an apartment with lots of close neighbours that is going to affect your wireless performance.
Secondly jury rigging a bunch of routers together doesn’t sound optimal. Basic home routers are not very smart and could actually be fighting each other.
I would suggest one or more Unifi access points. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to start. Minimum would be a PoE switch or PoE injectors and a couple of their cheapest APs their lite offerings are perfectly adequate for domestic and soho use. You don’t need a CloudKey as you can run the SDN controller on your home assistant instance or another computer. You only need it up for actual configuration.
If you like it and want to go the whole single pain of glass SDN experience then a second generation UDM or UDM pro is the way to go and is a perfectly decent firewall and router for home use. I personally use Pfsense and you will hear folk telling you it is better but it is overkill for most home use cases and has a much steeper learning curve.
my suggestion would be a bit different from the above as before jumping to another HW system (I have nothing against Ubiquiti, planning to buy myself too but I doubt it will be a solution unless your current HW is defect).
I would invest in an enviromental wifi coverage assessment first (netspot pro is a good tool and you can request a 7days trial license for free).
In particular I would:
Make sure APs are set on 20Mhz width channel range and on channel 1-6-11 respectively (this will increase bandwidth/airtime available per device unless your limiting factor is a crowded wifi enviroment)
remove all smart roaming/whatever in your router/APs and make sure you have different SSID for 2.4 and 5ghz
if you do not need roaming give a different 2.4Ghz SSID per AP
use as mach as you can manual IP / IP address reservation to reduce DHCP lease time
remove any USB3.0 devices connected to your routers/APs as these may cause interference
once at least the first 2 points are covered run a survey with NetSpot Pro and check for regions of poor signal quality/interference and reduce them as much as you can: poor signal by moving APs, interference changing channels…in case you have neighbors wifi interference.
if you still have devices in problematic areas remove/connect them by cable or add a wifi repeater connecting it on the closer (in terms of signal strength) AP.
Once this is done it will be time to reduce wireless traffic: with so many devices broadcasting (mdns) can be a threat.
Remove it at device level if you can (ex. you can on esphome) while if you can’t you need to segment your network by VLans (maybe here is where Ubuquiti come handy).
Wireshark is a good tool to check which are most problematic device broadcasting too much or leading to a lot fo TCP errors (which cost airtime due to re-transmission happening),
Another thing you can do is check if your router has too high CPU consumption in which case it can be the root cause of dropped frames hence bad connection quality: if this is the case reduce the services/feature you have activate (ex. samba sharing, etc…)
Your recommendations sound very interesting. My concern would be the pfsense learning curve. Are there any guides available to assist a newbie like me?
It is a really cool tool but overkill for most stuff. However if you really want to play then Tom Lawrence of Lawrence does an excellent set of guides. I can also recommend the official docs just clicking the “?” icon on a configuration page will take to to docs about that page.
I did download the trial version of Netspot Pro and ran a whole house scan before making any changes. I was quite surprised the see the detailed heat map and how badly my three routers were positioned and oriented. Knowing this I have changed router positions significantly and am implementing your other suggestions where I can.
My main router is a TP-Link AX5400. I have used the IP and MAC binding feature in an attempt to get fixed IP addresses in the IP range (1 to 100) which is outside the DHCP control range But afterward, the client list still shows the original IPs rather than the ones I assigned. Still trying to figure this out. Also, this router does not alow selection of Channel. It is claimed to be automatically controlled. When this phase is completed I will run another scan and readjust.
mspinolo has excellent recommendations that mirror my own setup.
I would add a few things to this:
If there is a setting for b/g b/g/n g/n and n only, set it to n only.
If you can control the beacon and DTIM rates, try:
100ms @ 3 and 300ms @ 1 (default will be 100ms @ 1)
Test each setting for a day and see how it performs (unless it sucks right off the bat)
Enable airtime fairness if available
The individual clients themselves may need to be rebooted for that to take effect, though they may take up to a day if they request DHCP from the router on a regular basis.
Wat?
That is not good, even the lowest end consumer crap generally lets you select the channel somehow… there is probably some setting that needs to be disabled, I suspect “smart connect”, make sure it is off, you may need to look at some “advanced” config tab to find the channel and mode settings, but they have to be there somewhere
I agree DTIM is another parameter to correctly set: lower values usually lead to less disconnections, but too low consume too much airtime hence bandwidth so richieframe suggestions are very sensible.
Channel selection is crucial if you want a reliable setup: in netspot survey scan check “interference” value; if this is high means you have areas with overlap of 2 SSID with same channel hence not optimized setup (specially if you have same SSID per every APs this will cause clients to continuously jump from connecting to one AP to the other)
Out of the 75 devices how many ESPHOME devices you have?
I was able to turn Smart Connect off and then I was able to select channel and channel width.
I did have 6 ESPHome devices before my HA crashed last week. Unfortunately the backups were corrupt too, so I am starting from scratch with the intent to put most devices in ESPHome. I will also be adding Zigbee devices to this system.
I use OPNsense, an offshoot of Pfsense, and it is a joy to appreciate the router will not cause any problems. It has a clean interface and there are official docs as well as many other resources on the Web on how to set it up.
The best bit is that after the monthly updates, to keep it state of the art, you can save the config file. If any hardware fails, replace it, install OPNsense, upload the config file and everything is as it was. I use an old mini-itx board, 8G RAM, 32G SSD, and an Intel 4 port NIC.
Find a slightly used small business router. My favourites are the Cisco RV series (RV042G, RV340, etc.). Buy some slightly used enterprise grade APs. My favourites are the Netgear WND series such as WNDAP6xx series, WAC720, etc. Wire these APs (via switch if needed). Place where optimal signal is achieved. All done.
One can try to piece something together with commodity hardware running open source and have excellent results. Or use consumer level “mesh” solutions that are supported as long as the manufacturer deems they want to keep running the “cloud” servers.
