Since I had some comments about the facts here are the ones I hold on to since the early days until now:
First of, some explanation about wording:
Router: A device which translates traffic from one network to another. Usually LAN and WAN networks.
AP: Access Point, a simple device providing Wifi access and translating it to another form of access. Usually Wifi to a Cable network, but it could also be Wifi to Wifi. I’ll explain that later in the Mesh network part.
Mesh networks: there are two types of meshing in Wifi land; 1. the early days way, wifi being used to “extend” range, which is crappy and still gives lower bandwidth the further your away from the originating point. 2. Meshing the new way, creating a seperate 5ghz wifi network (hidden) to let the meshing devices talk to each other. Also every meshing device creates a new hidden access point for the next device, keeping the bandwidth high and ensuring a good coverage.
Seamless Roaming: Everybody is talking about roaming, something every smartphone does from day one. But since a decade or so Seamless roaming has become the standard and like the name says, it’s seamless. But is is important to know the difference, because if you setup a network with different AP’s (from different brands) chances are that roaming works, but Seamless roaming does not. There is a technical explanation for it, but the easiest route is to go for 1 brand only (even 1 series within a brand is sometimes needed to make it work).
Band Steering: It’s the system that decides if a higher bandwidth connection is possible and will “steer” the device towards this higher bandwidth connection, usually from 2.4Ghz to 5Ghz and so on.
Beamforming: AP’s send there signal in a certain direction, depending on the make and use of different antenna’s. For home and office uses they try to make this omnidirectional. The downside of that is that it has to average out the signal over the whole plane. And the reach of this signal is pretty short because of that. And as hopefully everybody know, the further you get away from the AP, the less bandwidth you will get. To make that a little better Beamforming has been invented. It tries to create some sort of signal “beam” to every connected device to get a little higher bandwidth.
MU-MIMO: What this means is that an AP can supply access to mutliple devices at the same time. MIMO Provides multiple inputs and outputs to a single client. MU-MIMO provides that to multiple users at once. So that is important if you have lots of clients using Wifi at the same time, offices or public buildings. At home you won’t notice the difference.
Airtime Fairness: This is important for the use of old devices within a network. And don’t get me wrong, a brand new washing machine with “smart” capabilities can be a device like that, because they often use old / slow wifi hardware for those. What Airtime Fairness does is create “time slots” for connections to transfer data to prevent slow devices from cluttering the network and make sure fast devices don’t become slow because of all slow devices. It’s a little more complicated, but this is the easy explanation.
Now to the good part, how to get good wifi coverage in your home. There are a couple of things you need to consider before getting AP’s and routers.
First make a map of all devices you want to connect to Wifi, and add there way of connecting (IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be). All devices have this somewhere in the specifications, so look it up.
After you have done so, you need to look for central spots in that map to place your AP’s. Those spots can be determined by the reach of cable or ideally by the range for the Wifi on the map.
I which I could give a table with the ranges for different Wifi frequencies and there bandwidth, but that is different in every country and with every AP. I say country, because every country have it’s own laws about how much Watt you are allowed to transmit in the air per frequency. Yes, by changing the country in the settings of some AP’s / routers you can mislead your device into sending at a higher Wattage, but you will be doing something illegal. Also, less and less devices are actually doing that nowadays.
Besides the possible range by the device you have to account for interference with other wireless networks, walls (box of faraday effect) and other interference of certain devices (microwave ovens for instance).
Keeping all that in mind, you could create a map with an global idea of what you might need in order to create coverage for every single device you have or plan to have in the future.
If you can’t get cables to the ideal places it’s no big deal. There are two ways to solve that: create a mesh network, or place the AP’s in a less optimal spot. The latter is easy and might work in some cases. Though if it doesn’t you have to get a mesh network. BUT, mesh networks are not the holy grail, to solve all your problems. So only use them in places where you have no other choice.
There is one exception, and that is ethernet over powerlines. In my opinion that could work even better then a mesh network, but it depends on the types of devices you have on you powerlines. For instance a vacuum cleaner motor tends to pull a lot of power on start and therefore might interfere with that ethernet over powerline stuff. So only go that route if that AP isn’t the most critical.
Now that you have that, you can buy some AP’s I say AP’s, because most of you only need one router, and that is probably provided by your Internet Provider already. Getting your own router and removing the one from the provider is a different discussion for another time.
The brand of AP’s and the series is not important, what is important is what is offers you and what you need. So look at the explanation of words above and see what you need for your network to work.
If you wan’t HA to integrate with it, don’t forget to look for it in the
list of integration.
After you place all AP’s you have to do some things to make it perfect. Though there are devices that can do everything by themselves, i’m old fashioned and like to do it myself. If you have neighbours, you can use an app on your phone to measure the amount of interference from their Wifi and use different channels. And if you have a Zigbee network (look up which channel it is on) you have to keep that in mind also. For the 2.4Ghz bandwidth that is.
In this image they assume you use the widest channel width possible by the way. In almost every AP you can choose the channel width (20Mhz, 40Mhz, 80Mhz). Keep in mind, the higher the number (80Mhz) the smaller the width, thought the higher it’s throughput to it’s clients is. But because it’s width is smaller the chances of connection failures / interference from other devices is more likely.
Also keep in mind that the higher the frequency (2.4Ghz, 5Ghz or 6Ghz) the shorter the range. So a TV which streams 4K over Wifi should relatively be close to the AP to do that. A washing machine on the other hand could be on the very outside of the range.
Misconception number one is a gaming PC or console, depending on the type of gaming of course, should be wired.
You can start by setting everything up and leave everything to automatic. If it all works you can even leave it at that, but if you ever experience some anomaly. You do have to figure out which setting to change. Sorry, that will be another discussion for another time.
If I missed something, please ask. Good luck to you all. And remember, every situation is different, so when somebody says: you have to get this and that because all the other stuff doesn’t work, only mean it didn’t work for them in their particular situation.
