Covering a large house with thick walls/floors - price not important

[Oisteink]

I've been asked to help figure out how some in my family can cover their house with proper WiFi that can handle a large-ish load.

Main coverage of wifi would be basement, 1st floor and 2nd floor.

Internet enters in the basement, and the floors are about 1 meter / 3 feet thick, containing about 10cm / 4 inches of concrete. There is one cable of tp going from the room where internet enters in the basement up to the attic. That's the only cabled backbone available, and adding more is tough as there is water-based heating in all floors.

Current setup are two RT-AC66U's - one in basement and one in attic. There's a Celeron J-1900 running pfSense handeling shaping and working as a firewall. It's currently connected to a coax-uplink, but they are looking at fiber options.

When the kids have visitors like in weekends or holds lan parties the net slows down. The networks should be able to handle at least 20 devices without slowdown.

They are willing to invest a bit in getting this stable and smooth.

My current thought are:
- Mesh wifi - either Velop or Amplifi HD - I'm quite sure this is not the best option for gaming, but it might give great coverage.
- Re-use the cable going to the attic and place one (or more) UAC-AC (or similar device) in basement and one in attic.

Any thoughts?

 

[pete y testing]

Re-use the cable going to the attic and place one (or more) UAC-AC (or similar device) in basement and one in attic.

that is what i would do and if poss find out how the ethernet runs and see if you can break into it on the first floor and add an access point there as well

 

[Samir]

I don't think a pure wireless solution will work to get the results they want. What type of wires are available on each floor? Coax? Phone? You'll need some sort of wired backbone for speed.

 

[MichaelCG]

With floors that thick, do not expect any WiFi to provide much speed nor coverage across floors. How are the walls? More than likely to get good coverage, speed, and density, additional physical drops will be required to get additional wired APs across the house.

What is not clear is if the slow down is the Internet connection or the WiFi. With thick floors, the 5GHz signal for sure won't be propagating up or down well. So that leads me to think that there are a lot of devices on the 2.4GHz which rarely scales out well.

 

[ryarber]

I've been asked to help figure out how some in my family can cover their house with proper WiFi that can handle a large-ish load.

Main coverage of wifi would be basement, 1st floor and 2nd floor.

Internet enters in the basement, and the floors are about 1 meter / 3 feet thick, containing about 10cm / 4 inches of concrete. There is one cable of tp going from the room where internet enters in the basement up to the attic. That's the only cabled backbone available, and adding more is tough as there is water-based heating in all floors.

Current setup are two RT-AC66U's - one in basement and one in attic. There's a Celeron J-1900 running pfSense handeling shaping and working as a firewall. It's currently connected to a coax-uplink, but they are looking at fiber options.

When the kids have visitors like in weekends or holds lan parties the net slows down. The networks should be able to handle at least 20 devices without slowdown.

They are willing to invest a bit in getting this stable and smooth.

My current thought are:
- Mesh wifi - either Velop or Amplifi HD - I'm quite sure this is not the best option for gaming, but it might give great coverage.
- Re-use the cable going to the attic and place one (or more) UAC-AC (or similar device) in basement and one in attic.

Any thoughts?

Here is what I've recently done and I have been well pleased. First let me tell you what I had before. I have a large house with somewhere around 100 networked devices. My sq footage is around 8 - 10,000 sq ft. but I only have 2 floors to my house. I had an ASUS RT-68u router with 2 other access points. One was an old apple Time capsule that I set up in bride mode. Another was an off brand access point. I did have them set up with separate SSIDs, but they were all hard wired back to the ASUS router.

I hated that when you would walk to another part of the house, it would't let go of the weaker signal. I also hated that any time you would get a new device, you had to program 3 separate SSIDs into them. My son also complained that he didn't get good coverage in his room on one corner of the house. I had also set the router up in the attic, away from where my internet entered the house and it wasn't close to my ethernet switch. So I had to run a long ethernet cable from my cable modem to the attic and then back down to the switch. Therefore I couldn't take advantage of some of the router's functions like attaching external storage and I also had to plug in some of my more critical pieces of equipment to the switch instead of the router (eg. my security system, my home automation controller, etc).

I looked at the Linksys EA9500. The WiFi range was very attractive to me. I was hoping I could somehow get a strong WiFi signal throughout the house and not have to worry about adding APs. What I didn't realize was that Linsys' firmware left a lot to be desired. After several days trying different things to get control of my network like I had with the ASUS and router crashes, I gave up on the Linksys and went back to the ASUS. But instead of sending the thing back, I turned off wifi on my ASUS and used the Linksys as an access point. This allows me to keep the better router down by my wiring closet then just run one ethernet cable up to the attic where my very expensive access point lives now. BUT, WOW!!! The WiFi quality went up astronomically. I can cover my entire house with this one AP.

The only down side to this setup is that I no longer have a guest network. I could set up the guest network again on the ASUS if I wanted. Right now it is just acting as a hardware router and nothing else. But where it is sitting in my wiring closet, the signal quality is pretty bad in much of the house.

If money is no object, I'd suggest the Linksys EA9500, but as an access point. You could put it in a central location in your house and wire it back to your RT-66 and turn off the wifi on the ASUS. Additionally, with the EA9500, since it is a tri band device, if you do need to extend the range with range extenders, you can do so without hurting your bandwidth much at all.

 

[Samir]

Very interesting. Does the ea9500 not have multiple ssids per radio? If so, you can create a guest network there and put it on a seperate vlan.

 

[System Error Message]

The problem you should know is that its not only about getting stronger wifi but your device can communicate. It has gotten to a point where my asus ac88U can be seen by some devices like a smart tv and printer but they're too far away to communicate back even though signal strength is 40%. So the best choice is to put wifi in the same room rather than trying to get through walls.