Who has more than 100 devices on their network?

Hardware
21

Rules of thumb:

  • 30 devices per access point max.
  • 50% channel utilization max.

WiFi channels are shared with all devices in the vicinity regardless of which AP they are connected to. In a saturated channel even a few devices with little traffic will have speed problems with real-time applications like video.

On a 500 Mbps wireless connection with little traffic, even movies with a data rate of less than 100 Mbps kept stuttering. My problem was channel congestion. Normally it was 30% but my video streaming sent it upwards of 70%, which is a non-starter for 4K HDR. Conditions have improved now giving a lot a headroom in the those channels.

However, my 2.4 GHz channel sees 60% interference from neighbors, sometimes more. But this doesn’t degrade my traffic as much because all I have on that band is IoT stuff with bursty communications that are not as affected by congestion.

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22

I’ve been off and on following your posts on this topic and other folks posts on similar as well… I’ve been trying to get my brain around the ‘best’ wifi path for home automation (with maximum local only control) for a while. And have wasted too much coin and too much time on possible solutions.

Where I am today:

  1. the whole wifi 6, 6e and 7 thing is a real cluster-f*&$# / money pit IMHO.

  2. ‘open’ wifi setups such at OpenWRT lag closed systems probably with the longest time line of any systems I’ve ever seen. Getting Wifi firmware for open system such as OpenWRT and Linux is a real pain.

I messed around with some of the early and mid wifi mesh systems, both open and closed early on. I never really found an ‘optimal’ setup for the above goal of a good wifi system with support for a lots of devices, good coverage and maximum local only control.

I tried going down the OpenWRT path, however the combo of its sparse documentation and lagging in supporting the frustratingly fast changing wifi ‘standards’ left me very frustrated with this path.

Where I am now… I just want a good wifi mesh system that will support a lot of wifi devices and cover a reasonable sized house and yard of various wall constructions. What I have found and am experimenting with now:

TP-Link (yes the company has some baggage) Deco BE16000 WiFi 7 mesh system.

For some reason, Costco (at least in USA) has a exclusive deal with TP-Link and this specific ‘Deco’ model, the BE16000. As far as I can tell, it is priced very low for a system that on surface is right at the leading edge of the latest Wifi standards and protocols.

The things I am most interested in with this product is it support of the IoT WifI 6 standards to support a lot of the new ESP and other WiFi 6 IoT devices. It’s implementation is far from complete, however it appear it to be ‘in the mix’.

Second, WiFi 7 6 GHz back haul support. If you have the ‘right’ wall construction in your house, doing a mesh WiFi with 6 GHz seems a good option. Again, this product seem to be right ‘in the mix’ (however my ISP speed is only in the 500M levels, far below some of the new possibilities. It is not complete however, for example, as far as I can tell, this device supports two 6 GHz channels for back haul (and eventually clients), however only one of the channels seems to be supporting the back haul function. That said, I am seeing mesh wifi performance pretty near ISP max rates across my mesh wifi.

Third, it supports 2.5 Ghz ethernet with 5 ports at each device and 2.5G wired back haul. If you have ISP rate greater than 2.5G, then frustratingly some of there other Deco products may be a better path for you with 10G, however these Deco devices do not support some of the WiFi 7 functions that the BE16000 does.

Fourth, back to price. I was unable to find any 3 access point WiFi 7 setups for sale anywhere close to the price point of this device at USA Costco, about USD 900.

Good hunting!

23

I remeber them!

About the same load/devices but on a more ancient device I got for free from a friend.

The key might be openwrt which proofed to be reliable and stabpe to me every second of the day. Vendor firmware often comes with bugs and limitations that get never fixed - don’t trust them, don’t use them otherwise they will limit you (like to 100 devices).