If money were no object...

[jgomberg]

I'm looking for some input from folks who have had "hands-on experience" with some of the higher end dual band wireless AP's.

Background:

I have a 4,500 square foot rancher (single level home) in a U shape floor plan, located in Southern California. We currently have a Linksys WRT610N on one end of the house near to and connected to the SB6120 DOCSIS 3 cable modem. The WRT610N serves as both a wireless AP as well as a wired gateway serving up DHCP for a Linksys E3000 that resides in the office/media room. The two routers are connected via CAT6. Both routers run WPA2-AES Personal (mainly because I'm too lazy to set up radius.)

We have 4 hardcore gamers, appleTV, shared wireless printing, iPhones, iPads, and several IP Video Cams for security. We use AirPlay to push content from our phones and/or pads to the AppleTV as well as concurrently stream content from the net. I do development work and it's not unusual for me to push and pull 25 to 50 Gig files to and from the cloud.

Needless to say we have some fairly heavy data transfer activity going on and it is not unusual to watch streaming content choke to a crawl often resulting in long load latencies on the video streaming devices along with frequent Max Headroom behavior.

I've run various speed tests from both routers and have decided to (in addition to verbally abusing Cox) upgrade the SB6120 to an SB6121 (with low expectations) to deal with the provider side of the issue and now want to do the same with the AP's (because you just can't blame the cable company for everything forever.)

Assume, for the sake of argument that signal strength to/from either AP is adequately strong and not an issue, and that the CAT6 run between AP's is well within spec.

So, after the changing the cable modem, I'm going to "upgrade" the AP's.

I've read a number of the reviews, looked at the stats, scratched my head, and decided to humbly ask members of the forum who have had hands-on experience to comment on the performance and reliability of their hardware and ask, if money were no object, which dual band, wireless AP's would you select for the job considering the amount of traffic we move.

In this scenario, I don't want to have to have to reboot/power cycle any hardware and I'm thinking that Lan to Wan throughput along with wireless concurrency and reliability are the most critical priorities.

I'm leaning towards a couple of Linksys E4200v1's since they are available locally (I like to support my local retailers) because they seem (based on the review here) to out perform the E4200v2's (depending on use) and because I can flash them with dd-wrt down the road if needed (a low priority consideration.)

Other routers I am considering are something from the Netgear WNDR series or the ASUS RT-N56U. This is the point where my head starts aching as there are numerous tradeoffs between the three manufacturer's products. If I assume that the backplane speed and wireless concurrency of each product is well in excess of our peak internal demand (and I realize that may be a reach) what, besides price, differentiates these products and makes one stand out over the rest?

Thanks in advance,

Jeff

 

[stevech]

lots of sq. ft. means one WiFi router and one or more WiFi access points (APs).
There's a FAQ here on this.

 

[thiggins]

It sounds like you could benefit more from better or some QoS than just "upgrading" APs.

You should consider directing any 802.11g devices that stream or generate a lot of traffic to their own APs. This would free more bandwidth for N clients.

I would also try a Ubicom-based router. Its automatic QoS does a very good job of separating time-sensitive from normal data traffic. Downside is that it works primarily on uplink traffic. But it can control contention for downlink TCP/IP traffic by delaying ACKs.

Ubicom routers usually implement a wireless form of the auto-QoS called WISH, which could also help with wireless bandwidth contention.

Many of D-Link's routers are Ubicom-based, the most recent being the D-Link DIR-827.

Ubicom has some blog posts about its technology. Here is one about WISH.

 

[rhombus]

Yeah, QoS is your main priority, and good wireless APs are your second priority.

Your internet connection is probably much slower than the maximum WAN-LAN (and vice-versa) throughput of the models you are considering. This means no QoS can directly control internet downlink traffic. It also means looking at the WAN-LAN throughput charts to assist your router choice in this network is a waste of time.

 

[sfx2000]

If money is no object then I would seriously consider moving to corporate grade HW.

Ruckus Zoneflex - dual band with beamforming... I've had good experiences with these.

http://www.ruckuswireless.com/

Xirrus also comes to mind, I've been at conferences where these were in use with mixed mode STA's and they were very fast and reliable.

http://www.xirrus.com/

And goes without saying, Aruba and Cisco are also good choices

 

[Terry Kennedy]

if money were no object, which dual band, wireless AP's would you select for the job considering the amount of traffic we move.

In this scenario, I don't want to have to have to reboot/power cycle any hardware and I'm thinking that Lan to Wan throughput along with wireless concurrency and reliability are the most critical priorities.

I've been very happy with a set of 3 Cisco Aironet 1252's. With patience, you can get these used for $400-ish with both radios and all 6 antennas. If you don't have a high-power PoE switch to feed them, you'll need one of the AC adapters / power injectors as well, and may need to buy a mounting bracket if the unit you buy doesn't come with one. Lastly, software updates aren't free and if you aren't familiar with Cisco IOS, configuring and updating these can be a bit intimidating.

However, mine have been up continuously since being installed nearly a year ago, with only one scheduled reboot each to install a software update.