Adding and AP - Advice Wanted

[upsidedown]

I currently have a Netgear R6700 in the far back corner of the basement. It works well in most of the house but I want to improve wireless in the opposite corner on the Attic office. I am thinking of adding the Ubiquiti AC-US-IW mainly due to WAF and ease of mounting (I have wired cabling at the location). I am well aware of the POE requirements and the issues for management of the device but I am confident that I can get through the basics. I plan to keep the R6700 for Wifi also and use a common SSID.

So would this be an acceptable solution? I realize the IW units are probably not as strong but that is not a concern. My primary concern is decent handoff and I understand that Ubiquiti AP's tend to do a better job at this than others.

As an aside, I have a TMobile Personal Hotspot (AC-68u) that I could reconfigure, but I honestly don't like the form factor. This would only be done if a noticeably better solution.

Would love to get some thoughts on this.

 

[MichaelCG]

Just make sure the IW coverage patterns will roughly match the areas you are trying to improve. They do not put off much signal behind them at all...or even off to the sides of it like the various round Unifi models do. And to note....the round models can be mounted on a blank faceplate and in theory will have similar WAF levels. I have two AC-LR and one AC-IW in my house.

As for hand-off...remember, this is generally not an AP thing. This is more of a client thing. The only time an AP can help is if you have minRSSI or band-steering enabled and the AP kicks the client as it signal strength gets weaker or the AP wants to encourage the client to jump to 5GHz. Tuning the AP signal strengths is the best method to attempt a decent hand-off as well. If the AP is yelling really loud, the client thinks it can yell back just as loudly...which it can't....and the client doesn't switch to the closer AP.