Wifi at small hotel with thick walls

[adishmi]

Hey, I have a small hotel which is a very old house with thick walls.

It has three floors containing 6 rooms, a bar area and a pool.

The inside walls thickness vary from 15cm to 40cm of clay blocks and the outside walls are 60cm thick and made of stone. 

I would like to have a strong wifi throughout the whole place, including the pool area, and it shall support around 20-25 people.

 

Another thing to consider is the bandwith. From what I know (I shall check again), the max available mpbs the infrastructure in the area allows is 15mpbs, which is horribly slow, especially considering it shall support 20 people at once. From my research online I found out I can pay for 2 x 15mpbs and have two routers work together to acheive a better performance, and that that
the ASUS BRT-AC828 is capable to connect by itself to 2 x 15mbps and act therefore act as a 30mbps connection.

 

My current plan is to buy a ASUS BRT-AC828, place it on the ground floor and place some Unifi Ac Ap Pros throughout the place, something like the following pictures:

 

The Red is going to be the ASUS BRT-AC828.
The Blue are the Unifi Ac Ap Pros

 

The position of the Asus can't be changed.
The positions of the Unifi's on the second and third floors are probably static as well (the current flow of cables are from the Asus area up through the walls near the stairs, so it would be hard to place the Unifis elsewhere, although if you think my current plan is not good then we can rethink things.

The Unifis positions in the ground floor are at the dining area and one outside which will hopefully reach the pool. The closest area of the pool is 10 meters from the hotel (10 meters from the blue Unifi on the picture) and the furthest part of the pool is 30-35 meters.

 

Nothing has been decided yet.

And I would love to get some feedback 
Thanks in advance 

[samcool55]

I am really worried about that 2 x 15mbps connection.

Like, if there are 30 devices connected (which is likely because staff will probably use wifi too) that leaves 1mbps per person.

That's, 90's speeds... Like, i doubt that's enough for a 240p youtube video.

 

I would contact some ISP's first and see if they can come up with a solution because i don't think this is going to be a good experience for the guests even if the wifi is a non-issue.

[Jurrunio]

 You can actually try the Unifi's range first, just do the most basic of setup to them and see of they cover the farthest corners.

 

And as @samcool55 said, bandwidth is a big problem. A typical 1080p30fps stream from twitch for example is 3Mbps. In other words, your data plan isnt going to allow anyone to watch video together. At best they could go with Instagram I think. I wont be expecting much from a hotel this old, but still... This is a tech forum, we take 1080p60 videos with the internet for granted.

[adishmi]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

I am really worried about that 2 x 15mbps connection.

Like, if there are 30 devices connected (which is likely because staff will probably use wifi too) that leaves 1mbps per person.

That's, 90's speeds... Like, i doubt that's enough for a 240p youtube video.

 

I would contact some ISP's first and see if they can come up with a solution because i don't think this is going to be a good experience for the guests even if the wifi is a non-issue.

 

1 hour ago, Jurrunio said:

 You can actually try the Unifi's range first, just do the most basic of setup to them and see of they cover the farthest corners.

 

And as @samcool55 said, bandwidth is a big problem. A typical 1080p30fps stream from twitch for example is 3Mbps. In other words, your data plan isnt going to allow anyone to watch video together. At best they could go with Instagram I think. I wont be expecting much from a hotel this old, but still... This is a tech forum, we take 1080p60 videos with the internet for granted.

I feel you guys, I know it's bad, I come from a 100mbps and I would have like more.
Of course we would check if there is an option for more bandwith, in that matter you can't help (unless someone comes with a brilliant idea).
I don't reckon there will be more than 20 people at once which is kind of the max number of people (It would be great if there will be cause it means the place is thriving), so let's say I'm ok with 30mpbs at the moment (we haven't opened the hotel yet).

So... considering the current facts. What do you think I should do?

[Jurrunio]

23 minutes ago, adishmi said:

So... considering the current facts. What do you think I should do?

the position of routers and signal boosters seem good to me

[mynameisjuan]

3 hours ago, samcool55 said:

I am really worried about that 2 x 15mbps connection.

Like, if there are 30 devices connected (which is likely because staff will probably use wifi too) that leaves 1mbps per person.

That's, 90's speeds... Like, i doubt that's enough for a 240p youtube video.

 

I would contact some ISP's first and see if they can come up with a solution because i don't think this is going to be a good experience for the guests even if the wifi is a non-issue.

You do realize that wireless enterprise engineers target no more than 2mbps per person right? 

 

The fact that he is expecting 20 people using it, 30 will get him by. 

[brwainer]

In my experience with many hotel brands, minimum bandwidth per room for new or refreshed networks is around 500-750kbps per room - with a caveat that no hotel should buy service less than 50Mbps, and that after monitoring traffic for 6 months the circuit should not be more than 80% consumed for more than one hour at peak. This allows for some growth in usage over three-five years, which is the target refresh cycle for hotel networks.

 

If you can only get 2x15Mbps service, then I would look at limiting each device at 3 or 5Mbps. I have no idea whether that Asus has that function. Personally I would be looking at a PFSense router, you can do both dual wan and device bandwidth limiting and a lot more with PFSense. The easiest way to do this is to buy the NetGate SG-1100, then follow instructions here https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/routing/multi-wan.html using OPT1 as the second WAN port. For limiting user traffic you can set up a Captive Portal https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/captiveportal/captive-portal.html with the options “”Per-user bandwidth restriction”. If you just want users to be able to click through and accept then set Authentication Method to “None”.

 

You would need to use another AP at the location of the router to provide the same wireless coverage, but then you also have the benefit of all of your wireless being in one system which reduces headaches. You would also need a switch as the SG-1100 only has one LAN port, and the OPT1 would be used for WAN. But the SG-1100 is $160 whereas the only price I could find for that Asus model was €300, so the pfsense plus AP plus switch won’t cost much more.