Setup advice needed

[Raymond Svensrud]

Hi,
I'm pondering on how to best setup my network.

I have a house with 3 floors.

My "office", on the third flooor where my nas, file servers and the stuff i normaly would use a wired connection for, unfortunaly dosn't have wires drawn to it, and i don't want to drag the wires into the room either, so I have to make a wireless solution that gives me the best troughput on the LAN for the nas etc.

What would be the best solution here?

1. Two asus routers, in aimesh mode with one placed high on the 1 floor, and one put in the office that gives me a wireless backbone and then connect the servers with wires to this router.
2. Two routers, one in the first floor, and one on the third floor useing wireless bridge mode (or will this cut the throughput in halv?

Or is it a better way of doing this?

I might add that i do have wires to all the locations where smart tv's, gameconsoles etc is. So the wireless router in dosn't necacery need to handle any clients, allthough they do it today. Using a amplifi hd setup today but i see that the roaming isnt working as it should, so clients on 1 floor, connects to the access point in the third floor sometimes and not the one that today stands on the 2 floor.

The reason I want to switch away from amplifihd today is the lack of advanced router functions.

 

[degrub]

forget mesh if you need throughput
Keep your local connections wired in the office to keep high local bandwidth between devices. A simple unmanaged 1 Gbit switch will do the trick.
Use a bridge on 2.4Ghz with two wireless AC devices to connect the two floors wirelessly as a trunk connection. Make sure you orient them for the strongest signal and select a channel with low interference. You may have to mount them on the wall to do that. No other devices should be allowed to connect to the bridged devices on wireless. Place an AP where you need wireless access. It sounds like one AP on the 3rd and one on the 1st floor perhaps. Use the 5Ghz bands for this unless some of the devices only have 2.4GHz radios. Make sure the latter on widely separated from the trunk channel. (1, 6, or 11 in the US)

The better way to do this is to use existing cable - RG6 or 5 for MOCA or CAT5e or higher for ethernet to connect the two floors. although perhaps painful, it is is one time deal and will beat any wireless setup.

 

[Raymond Svensrud]

Okay, so if i understood you correct:

Office 3 rd floor: setup a wireless mediabridge ---> an access point / router on the third floor (connected to the ethernet) ---> accesspoint/router (or should this be in bridge mode?) on the 1 st floor which is also using the ethernet for backhaul up to thirdfloor ?

 

[degrub]

3rd floor: wireless bridge device (on AC 2.4 Ghz band) ---Gbit switch (enough ports for all devices)--AP (on AC 5Ghz band and channel) if you need wireless coverage
1st floor: ISP modem/router---wireless bridge device (on AC 2.4 Ghz band)
---AP if needed (on AC 5 GHz band) for wireless coverage
use directional antennas if possible since this is point to point.
use of 5 GHz band is avoid overlapping coverage on 1st and 3rd floors.
Best to have radios that can have strength reduced if need be to avoid significant overlap.

Alternatively, have you tried to position your AP on the second floor ? An AC based dual band device may cover the entire house from that location. You may have to mount it on a wall instead of ceiling to get the signal to all floors.

you may be able to use the bridges to get connection on third floor and then have the main AP on the second floor to provide coverage for all roaming users. Use the wired connections for everything else.

 

[Raymond Svensrud]

Hi,
Yes using one access point in the middle of the house would give coverage in the entire house. Tested with a single amplify hd router as access point in third floor, and that actually gives around 50% signal strength to all devices on the first floor.

But got around 20 wireless clients in the house, pluss the wired stuff, så guess one dual band access point isn't a good idea.

I could use the amplify hd routers as wired access points on 3 and 2 floor, and buy a new main router for 1 floor so I get the router functions and I have and use the mediabridge for the office,

Or will that be to many access points? I mean they would probably heavily overlap

 

[degrub]

i would start with one in the middle floor, on a wall, wireless AC 2x2 radios, dual band. Primary signal lobes are sideways parallel to the AP back plane and up away from the back plane. So a wall mount may be best depending on the building layout. Important point - throughput depends on the device radio as well as the AP radio. If either is weak, then the bandwidth will drop or connection may fail. Set up your bridge to get to the 3rd floor network only.

Alternative is one on the first floor ceiling and one on the 3rd floor ceiling. If you have to place the second one on the 2nd floor, then set it on its back on a table or the floor so that it will be less likely to interfere with the 1st floor. If all your devices support 5GHz band, start with that for the APs. Use the 2.4GHz band for the bridge as it will penetrate walls and floors better.
If the AP signal strength can be adjusted in the AP that will likely help reduce interference and aid in device roaming.

Have you considered powerline AV2 based ethernet instead of wireless ? A single pair can work pretty well with reasonable wiring and no arc fault breakers or whole house surge protectors. There are plenty of reviews and discussions on the site.

 

[Raymond Svensrud]

Yeah I tested out powerline adapters, even though its a new house, it didn't work out to good, only got around 40-50 mbits, 6 MB\s, so didn't like crossing cuircuits i guess.

Just borrowed a TP Link tri-band router and tried setting that up on the second floor, and looks like that one covered the house pretty good. With the netgear r7000 on the office in the third floor setup as a bridge against it on a dedicated 5gig band down to the second floor i achived a copy speed from the nas around 60 MB\s, the same i achived when i was sitting on a computer Connected to the same switch on the NAS. Might be the software raid on the nas not giving me anymore.

So i could do this very easy to start With, either buy two netgear x4s, and bridge one of them to the second floor over 5g. or, buy a tri band (asus rog gt-5400 for an example) and keep the old netgear as the bridge.

Getting the bridge Connected to a dedicated backhaul i important i Guess, so tri band is the way to go ?
The netgear x4s is on sale here now for 160 dollar, so i can actually buy 3 of those for one asus gt-5400...

Will i suffer alot if i go with the dualband option?

 

[degrub]

You do not want any other devices on wireless backhaul.