I am looking to upgrade my home setup to WiFi 6 (or WiFi 7) with a focus on maximum coverage for a large house. High-speed throughput is not my priority; I am more concerned with signal stability and reaching distant corners/dead zones.
Requirements:
Must have PoE-in (can be Passive).
Best possible coverage (highest antenna gain or best receiver sensitivity).
At least 2 Ethernet ports
I have been looking at the following models:
hAP AX³ – for the external antennas.
hAP AX S – I've noticed the 3x3 chain on 5GHz; does this significantly help with coverage/dead zones compared to 2x2?
hAP BE3 media – The gain looks high, but it’s 2x2.
For a single-device setup in a large house, which of these has the best "reach"? Does the 3x3 chain on the hAP AX S provide a tangible benefit for coverage over the external antennas of the AX³?
Comparing tech spec does not really help since for example hAP AX³ is advertised as model with best coverage, but budget model hAP AX S has better gain on antennas.
I want to replace hAP AC that I’m using since around 10 years.
Focus only on the most sensitive device to hear your smartphone's "whispers."
It's completely pointless to transmit at 1 kW to reach the catacombs of your house
if your smartphone can't penetrate the walls to respond.
The only thing you're doing, if you have some, is pissing off your neighbors.
So it makes more sense to install several low-cost, low-power access points to provide true home coverage,
rather than just one that can be heard everywhere... but then doesn't hear responses...
And then, speaking of 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, etc., also consider the characteristics of the peripherals you then use...
I use an Audience as the single AP in my house and it works quite well positioned near the center of the house. There are however a few places where the 5GHz signal does not work so well. I believe these spots are caused by large wall mirrors in the bathrooms. Luckily we don’t typically use our computers in any of these spots so having decent 2.4 coverage there is fine.
I picked the Audience because I was able to get a good price on a used one and I wanted to see if I could make the second 5GHz radio work as a dedicated network for a couple of wireless cameras. That has worked out well for us with a typical max of 4 simultaneous wifi users and about half a dozen low bandwidth wifi gadgets. I don’t anticipate needing more for a number of years.
I have always been critical of Mikrotiks client serving wifi…
This isn't that. Get a few of the wAP AX and run them back to a router running caps-man. This will give you best chance that Mikrotik can give to wireless. Signal stability is much better working with multiple APs rather than at distance going through things.
The hAP AX S has a different wifi chip and introduces a whole new set of problems.
Unfortunately I have only one place where I can connect AP via cable.
I’m not looking for device with highest transmit power, but the one that can hear and understand the whisper of my phone on the other side of the house.
There are better and worse WiFi chipsets, better and worse antennas. I’m not an expert in this area, that is why I’m looking for an advice, mostly from the practical point of view.
Since you mentioned hAP AX S - are there any known issues with this wifi chip? Random device disconnects? Worse network coverage than you can expect from spec?
None of the new wifi generations come with better coverage. Coverage is largely limited by country regulated EIRP (which is not affected by wifi generation, it's affected by frequencies used). With newer generations it's actually getting worse since same allowed Tx power gets spread over wider frequency channels (e.g. 320MHz for be V.S. 20MHz for a/g) and multiple Tx chains. OTOH the speed increases of newer wifi generations very often depend on higher required SINR (which is true to certain extent also for increased MIMO ranks) and with declining "S" part of the acronym and ever increasing "I" and "N" parts this effectively means shrinking area of speeds on par with promissed speeds for a given wifi generation (the remaining area is then served with "legacy" wifi speeds).
So we come back to what @rextended writes in one post above: have multiple "small" APs which provide excellent service in smaller area (where good service is actually required).
Would a Powerline set-up help this? Their performance & speed does vary wildly depending on the installation but the newer models are rated up to 2,400Mbps (doubt you’d get even half this but you did say speed wasn’t an issue): https://amzn.eu/d/00QaRNUO. You’d still need an access point. If 100Mbps-200Mbps Wi-Fi speed would be okay, you can go cheaper. I’ve installed loads of them over the years - they either work fine flawlessly for years or don’t really work at all. You know pretty soon after install so be careful with packaging so you can return.
Yes I have seen issues with the hAP AX S that I have swapped into the same spot in a caps-man system. The wAP AX with the new driver works far better than any Tik Radio I have dealt with in over a decade. Pulling the wAP out and applying the same config to the hAP causes devices to stop connecting. Some devices to connect but not pass traffic. The latest Router OS did make it so ft roaming between the hAP and wAP actually worked this time.
As for the fact that you “can only put a device in one location”…
I don’t negotiate with physics.
Its a bad design and will cause issues. So if you don’t wanna listen… thats fine. Doesn’t affect me at all.
There are also devices that are "converters" between power line and wifi (i.e. the powerline adapter includes an AP), examples: https://www.devolo.global/products
Indeed there are but I didn’t mention them as I assume the original poster would like to use Mikrotik access points (although for a quieter life, using Devolo Wi-Fi 6 might be, err, less stressful).
I personally have not had good luck with powerline adapters when going across circuits in big houses. I’ve tried them in a few places and it was never that great. I have gone back and figured out a regular cabled solution in most cases. I have found replacing existing phone wiring to be fairly straightforward.
Yes, I did find mine for a good price. I got it for under $100 about 4 years ago which was nice for me because I had a use for the 2nd 5GHz radio. In your case though, considering you are more concerned with coverage I would take my existing AP and do a site survey. You may find that you can cover everything from a different location than where it is now, or you may find there is no good way to cover everything from one location. In that case you could use your existing AP and the new one to provide better coverage without spending any more than you planned.
Surveying should be done more than it is I think. In one case I stuck one of those ceiling mount APs in the attic of a church just sitting on top of the drywall ceiling. We were site surveying trying to figure out where to mount it and we found that it covered a large area in that particular position. It probably covers about 10-12,000 square feet. We didn’t think we’d have a lot of people using it at once so we left it there to test for a week or two with the plan to add additional APs if needed. It’s been running for years now by itself with only dual chain 2.4GHz 802.11n. The office area is cabled so high bandwidth usage was not much of a concern and the building is brick, stone and metal roof, so interference from the nearby houses is pretty low.
As I said, success varies wildly depending on the quality and noise on the mains wiring. Newer houses tend to be better. Also, the specification has improved since AV600 speed devices so I often seen 400-500Mbps on the AV1000 devices which is adequate for many. But occasionally, the wiring/noise is awful so they’re not suitable. I always have a spare AV1000 in stock so I can quickly try it out in residential settings.
I did a test and connected a budget AP that is about 7–10 years old. My phone was not able to connect in all areas where, with the hAP ac, there were no issues and the connection was very stable. So it clearly does matter what antennas and chipset are used.
Of course, I could try adding more APs, but maybe one good MikroTik device will do the job (I just need slightly wider Wi-Fi coverage). Are there any recommendations? I would like to focus this discussion only on MikroTik APs. Thank you for your understanding.
with a ceiling AP (less probability of anything, furniture or people being in the middle - of course nothing can be done for walls)
with it placed exactly at the center of the area to be covered
So you want to try a cAP Ax: https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ax
AND bring an ethernet cable to the ceiling of the most central room of your house,
AND overcome (this is a tough one ) the negative WAF.
) the negative WAF.