Best Wifi solution for house with chicken wire in the walls

[SquarishBongo]

I live in 1600 square foot bungalow built in the 50s. The walls are unfortunately lath and plaster with chicken wire in them. Because of this wifi signal is a constant issue. Recently i've been looking at the "mesh" wifi systems like the orbi, linksys velop, google wifi, ubiquiti amplifi. What solution should I get?

 

thanks any help is much appreciated

[Firewrath9]

Ethernet.

[Br3tt96]

3 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

Ethernet.

I'm sure he doesn't want to connect a laptop, phone, etc to a rj45

[SquarishBongo]

thank you, but i would like a good wireless system

[TheDev]

if you can get Ethernet to a few rooms, getting some ubiquiti unifi APs would seem like a good idea.

[Mikensan]

One alternative, possibly, to mesh is using ethernet over powerline and connecting access points to those. Give the age of the house your results may vary on how well that works, can't hurt to test anyway. They're usually around $40 for a pair, and $20 for individuals to expand with in the US.

 

Problem with mesh is you need just enough strong signal to re-broadcast, like a venn diagram. I a little biased, but I vote for ubiquity.

[vanished]

If your walls are actually filled with wire, I can see why that would be a problem.  It might simply be impossible to find an AP powerful enough to get a good signal throughout the house, or if one does exist, it might be so expensive that it makes my next suggestion seem reasonable.  That is, put a separate AP in every room you want wifi, and cable them all together.

[SquarishBongo]

i am open to having an ap in several rooms. But which ubiquiti product should i be looking at exactly? and how would i go about configuring them?

[Mikensan]

17 hours ago, SquarishBongo said:

i am open to having an ap in several rooms. But which ubiquiti product should i be looking at exactly? and how would i go about configuring them?

If you go with ubiquiti, their Mesh solution would work just fine.

If you go with ethernet over powerline, almost every brand is equal. I'm using TP-Link at home.

[beavo451]

You should do multiple hardwired access points. A wireless mesh network will be far less effective. 

[Mikensan]

Oh yea other than powerline ethernet adapters, you have MoCa adapters as well:

http://a.co/b08sfku

 

If you already have Coax ran through your house, this makes life easy.

[Psittac]

On 8/13/2018 at 2:50 PM, Ryan_Vickers said:

If your walls are actually filled with wire, I can see why that would be a problem.  It might simply be impossible to find an AP powerful enough to get a good signal throughout the house, or if one does exist, it might be so expensive that it makes my next suggestion seem reasonable.  That is, put a separate AP in every room you want wifi, and cable them all together.

piggy backing off this idea I would look at something like this AP 5 pack and you will need POE Injectors. (I haven't used the POE injectors, just a random pack I clicked on at amazon).  Some ubiquiti AP's come with injectors, some don't, this one doesn't.  If you feel confident in running some cat5e or better that sounds like the best solution.

 

If you don't want to do all of that I would give the amplifi HD a go and see how it does. I swear by that thing as it has fixed every house I've put it in (3 and counting)  Though, it sounds like you have a faraday cage going on so who knows if it's strong enough.

 

Lastly you could try just one of those AP's and see how well it does, then buy more if you need to.

 

edit: just be warned that I think you would have seperate wifi networks for each AP.  The ubiquiti AP's are meant for enterprise deployment so I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a mesh function on them. I wouldn't know, never had the need for more than one because I'm residential and barely use wifi anyways.  Would be interesting to research though.

 

edit again: I'm sure you could adapt this to ethernet or search harder for an exact solution.  I haven't watched the whole video