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Netgear R7000p good enough for AP?

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Biloba

New Around Here
Hi,

I have an older Netgear R7000 acting as my router, core switch and sole WIFI source in a corner of the basement of my 3 story home. 2.4GHz coverage is not too bad but has trouble reaching the opposite side of the house, especially on the 2nd floor.

I'd like to improve coverage and switch clients to 5GHz.

Would adding new Netgear R7000p (Currently on sales @ 170$ CAD) configured as an AP on the 1st floor of the opposite side of the house be good enough to increase speed / range of my setup? I'd like to keep things relatively simple.

As a side question, I was looking into Ubiquity AC Pro access points. Do those things need to be wall mounted to work properly or can you leave them on a shelf like a router with external antennas.

Thanks!
B.
 
I was looking into Ubiquity AC Pro access points. Do those things need to be wall mounted to work properly or can you leave them on a shelf like a router with external antennas. They work best in the proper orientation.
 
A few infrastructure questions. Do you have ethernet or coaxial wired through the house? This would allow for wired backhaul so you could use your radios as full stations, as opposed to repeaters. A last resort would be AV2 powerline to provide the "wire", but they're somewhat trial-and-error, depending on quality and layout of your electrical circuitry. Assuming you can find at least one method to provide wired backhaul, then yeah, two standalone consumer AIO's aught to be fine as APs.

If you don't have a solution for wired backhaul, you might want to take a look at a more intelligent mesh product, which, assuming AP-to-AP signals are good enough, will likely provide better client handoff and overall network behavior for devices transferring between and/or talking across all APs. TP-Link Omada, Eero Pro, etc. UniFi's best value-add is in an all-Ubiquiti stack (gateway, switch, AP), as opposed to mixed-vendor. Still good for the wifi piece, but much of the central stuff is wasted with other switches and gateways in play.
 
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For the size of most residences, access point mounting will not make a huge difference and plenty use APs on shelves. The location of the AP is a lot more important than its orientation.

Spending so much money on just one more consumer router to only act as an AP seems a waste. For around the same money you could probably even buy 2x APs, e.g. Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite or TP-Link EAP225v3, or better yet 1x AP and an Edgerouter ER-X. Then you can use the ER-X as your main router and turn your R7000 into only an AP. This gives you access to more powerful routing features like VLANs for segmenting your network and Smart QoS, all for the same budget you were willing to pay for only one consumer router.

If you are not using Ethernet, then MOCA or mesh network like Orbi are the best alternatives.
 

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