advice on router/AP setup

[cerenoc]

Hi,
I've lived in small apartments my whole life where one WiFi router was plenty. Now we moved to a long, narrow, tall row-house type place with 3 floors and a basement. My Fios box is in the basement and there's a bit of ethernet wiring going to the first floor. I have a 2-year-old TP-link Archer C7 router. When I set that up on the first floor, the basement and top floor get pretty weak signal. Also, my wife's office is in the basement and cell phone reception is almost zero there. She needs the phone so good WiFi in the basement fixes that. I tested the C7 router hooked up directly to the Fios box in the basement and that works great, but of course doesn't reach 3rd floor. So I need another router/AP. I understand this is all very basic stuff, but here's the question:
I'll get another router, presumably something better/newer than the C7. Which one should go in the basement as the router and which should go on the first floor as an AP? I need more coverage from the 1st floor so it would make sense to put the new router there, but it will only be an AP, so the new features like MIMO and band steering would be wasted in an AP? The other way, the newer/better router would be stuck in the basement and wasted there on a fairly small area.
I don't have a great sense of what features of a router I'm wasting by just using it as an AP, so that's probably part of my problem.
Thanks for your help.

 

[degrub]

i would use additional APs with an existing router if you have a way of getting ethernet to each floor.

If you have RG6 coax cable (from digital TV signal, cable or satellite,usually, you should be able to use MOCA2 to extend to an AP on the 2nd or 3rd floor. You may have to restrict to 5GHz band, one on each floor or possibly use 2.4 GHz band on every other floor. It will depend on how "crowded" the wireless is from your neighbors. 5GHz will not penetrate more than one wall very well usually. It depends on the construction.

What are the side walls made of on your row house ?
Any plaster walls in the house ?
What are the floors/ceilings constructed of ?

The more information about the physical construction, layout, and connection options you can give us, the better we can try to help.

 

[Trip]

You could try to run two or more standalone APs (or routers set as APs), setting up and managing each separately, and probably get decent enough results out of the setup, but if you think you'd welcome things like centralized management and/or more seamless client roaming (from AP to AP), among other features, I would look towards a whole-house or SMB cluster/controller-based product (Google Wifi, Netgear Orbi, Eero Pro, Amplifi, etc.) They'd also give you the option to run your nodes via wireless backhaul if you had to in a pinch. Just something to think about versus disparate APs, vanilla repeating and WDS.

 

[cerenoc]

Thanks for the input.
No easy way to extend ethernet wiring to higher floors but the house is pretty new with coax wiring throughout, so MOCA could work. However, given that I can actually get pretty decent coverage throughout the house with a single cheap router, I'm thinking a two-piece setup may be good enough for now - one in the basement and one near the ceiling of 1st floor. I do want to the wireless connection to hand off smoothly between them though - so that if I'm starting a phone conversation in the basement via WiFI and then come upstairs I want to avoid dropped calls or missed words.
So if I plug my current router directly into the Fios box and then the existing ethernet cable leading upstairs to one of the LAN ports on the router, I just need an AP for upstairs? (Ubiquity UAP-AC-PRO?) Since the AP is essentially plugged into a LAN port on the router, does that mean they are talking to each other and doing the hand-off properly, or do I need to set that up somehow?
Thanks

 

[degrub]

if you want coverage above the first floor, make sure you place the AP on the wall near the middle or on top of a table or something so the RF beam extends up through the ceiling.

 

[Trip]

If you're aiming for usable quality VoIP over wifi with no cutouts when switching APs, then you definitely want the lowest latency backhaul possible, aka. ethernet (maybe MoCa), and a single wireless system of APs that supports fast transition roaming, roaming assist and power optimization -- aka 802.11r, .11k and .11v. That's not going to come from using standalone APs in tandem, nor will it happen by mixing a UniFi AP with an off-brand AP. You're going to need to start fresh with a single centralized product. If you're keen on UniFi, then great, but go all UniFi if you're hoping for the above results.