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Suggestion: Upgrade Networking Equipment

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Roadspill

Occasional Visitor
So here’s the deal

Current Setup:
- House: 1600~ sqft of liveable space, split level (2-story)
— Upper Floor: ~1100 sqft
— Lower Floor: ~550 sqft
— Lower Garage: ~550 sqft
- Equipment
— Router: ASUS AC-68 w/Merlin (current) [Centerish in Home]
- Internet
— Frontier FIOS 50/50 (upgrading too 100/100 or better here soon once they finish their upgrades)

I’m basically wanting to move from using one router w/WiFi from the center of the house to having multiple devices at each end of the home to better saturate both the interior of the home, but also to bleed out into our backyard.

Wants:
- Great Wireless throughput.
- Not Buggy
- Rarely Crashes
- Stable connections

Uses:
- Excessive Gaming
- Streaming
- Downloading

Tech Skills:
Intermediate to Advanced (can figure things out through reading and other avenues.)

Budget:
$300-400 maybe more for the right setup.

I have been happy with the AC-68 from ASUS, but am just now looking to expand coverage on my property. So sticking with ASUS is not a necessity but is a brand I’m loyal too.

I do like the PoE AP offerings from Ubiquiti, although I don’t know how the small business equipment fairs against high gaming demands, etc.

At this point I’m fine with having a stand-alone wired router with multiple AP’s.

So any setups are free game. Ask any additional questions if you’d like.

Brands I use or have used but don’t like as much. (D-Link, TP-Link, the Linksys/Cisco branded gear) I’ve also used NETGEAR and found it to crash more than any other routers I’ve ever owned.
 
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Gobs of options, but many of us are pretty happy with our Ubiquity Unifi APs. Affordable, decent performance, good stability...as long as you can handle the less than obvious management and tuning. They for sure aren't the fastest single client APs out there, but when in a multi-client multi-AP environment, they generally do quite well.

First though...define "Great Wireless throughput". This is where people get lost on agreeing in WiFi fairly easily. Is 100Mbps great? Or is it 700Mbps? What can your clients even support. Are you trying to get a single client at the most fastest speeds ever? Or trying to support five clients humming along nicely at 50Mbps each? I have three Unifi APs at my 2500'ish sqft house and I can get 300Mbps+ from my laptops and generally 100Mbps+ from most other mobile clients no matter where I am in the house no matter how many active devices I have.
 
its funny how many think they are intermediate to advanced in networking. and then i suggest a router like mikrotik or pfsense that requires intermediate to advanced networking lol.

Unless you've gone into the linux bit of that asus router and changed settings from there you dont get to call yourself intermediate or advanced in networking.

Heres how i define the level. Newb (clueless about networking, can use a consumer router's GUI), basic (mastered the consumer router), intermediate (can work with advanced routers, CLI and linux), advanced (has mastered enterprise networking).

For a basic user like yourself, i suggest going with either asus or tplink if you like throughput (see the router charts on this site for wifi), if you're going for WAN throughput, none of the consumer routers i would recommend, as those routers require intermediate skill level. Ubiquiti indoor APs have good coverage rather than throughput.

You cannot have both throughput and coverage. I always configure wifi for high density environments, because that works out best for both you and your neighbours. 5Ghz tx power on max, all the settings to get more performance and reduce overhead. For 2.4Ghz i put tx power to lowest. If you want more wifi throughput you can place more APs and wire them up.
 
Will you need any speed more than 100mbps in any location? If your current internet connection throttles speedtest results, you can get two machines running iperf3 (one wired) and run speed tests there to get an idea of where your performance is.

How well does the 68U cover you now? Where are your dead spots?

is the router upstairs or downstairs?

how big is the backyard?

What wiring do you have between rooms now, or can you add?
Ethernet?
Coax?
Have you ever tried phoneline networking?
 
1x Ubiquiti USG
2x Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite

If you don't have a managed switch: Ubiquiti US-8-60W or Zyxel GS1900-10hp.

Gaming does not use much bandwidth at all and should be over wired connections, but if you have to use wireless, Ubiquiti APs are some of the lowest in latency.
 
1x Ubiquiti USG
2x Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite

If you don't have a managed switch: Ubiquiti US-8-60W or Zyxel GS1900-10hp.

Gaming does not use much bandwidth at all and should be over wired connections, but if you have to use wireless, Ubiquiti APs are some of the lowest in latency.
LAN gaming actually does, the problem i always have at a LAN party is copying the files. Thumbdrives are a bad way to do it and gigabit ethernet is decently good at it. The other thing with gaming is latency, you can have a lot of bandwidth but thats over 1 second, when you slice it down to the speed that games use, like 60 times a second to update with the server/others, you'll see how little bandwidth there actually is.
 
You cannot have both throughput and coverage. I always configure wifi for high density environments, because that works out best for both you and your neighbours. 5Ghz tx power on max, all the settings to get more performance and reduce overhead. For 2.4Ghz i put tx power to lowest. If you want more wifi throughput you can place more APs and wire them up.

Some questions, as I wanna learn a thing or two :)

Why is 2.4Ghz Tx power put to the lowest ?

How does placing more APs and wiring them up (I assume Ethernet backhaul ?) help in improving throughput ? Doesn't 1 client device connect to 1 AP at a time ?
 
Some questions, as I wanna learn a thing or two :)

Why is 2.4Ghz Tx power put to the lowest ?

How does placing more APs and wiring them up (I assume Ethernet backhaul ?) help in improving throughput ? Doesn't 1 client device connect to 1 AP at a time ?
If you're doing LAN transfers, a client per AP in the case of a single band being used improves throughput a lot. But in the case of WAN a duel channel wifi AC can utilise 60% of its rated bandwidth in practice, but thats with a single AP but if your WAN speed is high like above 500Mb/s then having more than 1 AP or wifi AC band helps a lot. Most clients are single or dual channel wifi AC with a number being tripple channel now with MU-MIMO coming out. Wifi client balancing needs to be considered as well. If you have 2 people in the same room, they will connect to the same AP if wifi is distributed. This only matters for speeds above 500Mb/s or if you do LAN transfers like i mentioned.

Streaming uses far less bandwidth though. The best at the moment is 100Mb/s of 4K encoded stream but typically people use 20-30Mb/s for 4K.

Putting 2.4Ghz tx power to the lowest is to help balance with 5Ghz. 2.4Ghz practical throughput is always going to be lower, like around 30% at the best day. So if you want the client to pick the fastest wifi rather than best signal, putting the 2.4Ghz tx power to lowest help, and it also helps in distributed wifi APs and also not annoying your neighbours available 2.4Ghz space.
 
If you turn off 2.4Ghz and only use 5Ghz then the clients will always pick the fastest wifi.
 

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