Hi!
Friend of mine asked me for help with his WiFi issues. When I briefly looked at the “network” I noticed single no-name AP and a lot of devices, half of the house doesn’t really have a signal to handle comfortable web browsing!
House is built using typical American style - bunch of wooden beams with wooden plates. However the number of devices and area makes one AP insufficient.
The house looks like that:
(blue areas are storage space)
I gave him hAP ac and situation looks, well.. better but not as good as we want to. There’re following devices in house:
- Laptop, 802.11ac - high traffic, additionally it does hourly backups to NAS
- Laptop, 802.11ac - low traffic, additionally it does hourly backups to NAS
- Laptop, 802.11n (2.4 only) - low traffic, rarely used
- Tablet, 802.11n (2.4 only) - medium traffic
- Tablet, 802.11ac - medium traffic
- Tablet, 802.11n (2.4 only) - rarely used, very low traffic
- 2x Ebook reader - almost no traffic, but as I observed they’re connecting once an hour
- 6x mobile phone - 802.11n
- Currently 5-6 IoT devices, but giving the trend there will be more
Other devices, connected using cables:
- NAS / media server
- Set top boxes - mainly used for YT & media server
Probably there’re few more devices which he didn’t mentioned during when I’ve asked him. For me it looks like a nice puzzle and I have no idea how to plan this. He wants to build solid network, but I bet he’ll not spend fortune on equipment.
I’m little worried if hAP AC could be a main router in this case - it will need to handle separation of guests, isolated IoT network (with bunch of rules to allow certain devices connect to certain servers e.g. for updates) and finally handle NATing ~80/20Mb pipe.
Speaking about APs I was thinking about hAP ac + wAP ac at the first floor (the lower floorplan) and 2x wAP ac at the lower level. Additionally I think it will be reasonable to add wired router handling NATing & rules + connect everything with CAPSMAN.
Any ideas?