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Enterprise vs consumer wireless access point at home - worth it?

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Chunkers

Occasional Visitor
I have an average sized home in which I have not been able to achieve good overall wireless coverage using a single device, currently an Asus AC68U. I am pretty happy with the AC68U in other respects
Our network at home is small, typically 20 devices connected and most, but not all, are 11ac devices. The wife and kids do a lot of video streaming over wifi, mostly on Apple devices.

My current setup actually consists or 3 WAP's to give decent coverage over the entire house : the AC68U, a TP-Link TD8980 configured as a WAP and I also use homeplug based wireless N WAP to plug a gap in coverage in a bedroom upstairs. It's a bit of a mess but it works......

My TP-Link is unreliable and I will replace it, my default would be to buy an Asus WAP as my main device has been very reliable. I hope my new WAP will eliminate the need for the homeplug devices from my network.

I recently sought advice on another forum around trying to tidy this up and got a strong steer away from consumer based devices like Asus etc and towards low-end enterprise type WAP's like Ubiquiti Unifi and Xclaim xi-3 for better performance.

I would be interested in whether these devices actually offer measurable performance improvements over a good quality consumer device in my kind of application.

For me advanced networking features, quick client connection and the ability to manage many devices and multiple SSID's have no real benefit. It basically comes down to whether the range is better and the transfer speed in a like for like comparison is higher.

I sometimes suspect when one reads reviews people are very keen to justify their buying decisions i.e. more likely to write "I bought this expensive WAP and its briliiant" rather than "I bought this expensive WAP and its not better than my cheaper one"

I have come here for some (hopefully objective) advice.

Cheers!

Chunks
 
Business APs is often managed as a whole - one of them, or a dedicated computer works as a controller. They can also be aware of where the others are located. This means that hand-over can be smoother. They are also considerably costlier.
The radios does not deliver any particular advantages over consumer models. Range and speed are the same, actually sometimes lower.

If you are ready to spend the dough, 3 business APs wired together in a gigabit network will work quite well. The cheapest of these tend to have messy user interfaces. If you are not going to wire the APs to a network, but use powerline etc, I don't see advantages for you.

An alternative could be placing the AC68U better, and skip the other 2, or use them as bridges instead. Use a wifi analyzer app for your phone, and start measuring. There is a lot of advantages to a single AP setup, regarding economy, robustness, and simplicity. The step up to multi-AP business wifi is costly and more complicated.
 
Business class APs typically offer advantages in a few areas: centralized AP management, security/radius authentication, more seamless client hand-off and load distribution, and depending on how good/bad your current standalone APs are, better reliability as well.

That said, your concerns about ROI and admin simplicity are valid, as *any* one of these systems isn't going to be a *ton* more capable per radio (assuming we're not jumping up 600mW...) and management, while centralized, can sometimes be a pain. For example, UniFi requires their Java-based controller be running on a system in the LAN for setup. It need not be running once the initial AP is setup, but it is an extra, and sometimes time-consuming step. Also, it does help to upload a floor plan of your building(house), if you have one, to make it easier to see an accurate picture of the coverage heat map, and where there might be low-throughput, high-client load or outright dead-zones. Those are "features", yes, but for some unsuspecting home users, they might also be quite the annoyance, if those persons were under the impression of thinking one could just buy one of these systems, plug them in, and voila, wifi is miraculously fixed. For most business admins, this is trivial, and an expected part of the process, but for a home user, potentially not the case...

Regarding N vs AC, you can definitely mix the two in your deployment, using N for lighter clients/roaming/range (ie. phones, laptops, tablets) and AC for media-related stuff and/or wifi bridging/backhaul, should you elect to do that for any areas that don't have Cat5e/6 access. Before getting into bridging, though, I would fight, tooth and nail, to make sure you've exhausted all wired and/or powerline/moca options first. The more endpoints you can have wired, obviously the better.
 
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I wanted something to set and forget once the wireless is running. I run 3 Cisco small business WAP321 which run as one unit. You can roam around in my house and outside to the picnic table without losing a connection using Apple's FaceTime video calls. I run 2 SSIDs one for LAN and one for guess sharing across all 3 units. I did not get these free, I bought them used off eBay.

PS
One of my WAP321 wireless units runs across a powerline adapter VLANs and all.
 
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Well, my inexpensive ASUSes just run. So did the Cradlepoint WiFi routers. And the older yet Linksys (pre-Belkin).
The only unreliable WiFi gear I've owned had the Netgear or D-Link logos affixed.

I have some old Cisco APs. They don't make sense for the average consumer household.
 
Well, my inexpensive ASUSes just run. So did the Cradlepoint WiFi routers. And the older yet Linksys (pre-Belkin).
The only unreliable WiFi gear I've owned had the Netgear or D-Link logos affixed.

I have some old Cisco APs. They don't make sense for the average consumer household.

Can you maintain a FaceTime conversation across multiple wireless units as you roam? If you can then I would say you are good to go. Anything less and "I" would change it.
 
After reading your advice and giving it some thought I think overall I am better off buying a decent quality consumer device, I think buying an enterprise class device means I am paying for a lot of functionality I won't use and not necessarily getting any performance advantage for my particular needs.

Of course this doesn't mean the same logic applies to everyone, thanks for all the advice!

Chunks
 

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