Help with planning a mesh wifi network in an old building.

[Alfa229]

Hello all, 
I'm currently planning on switching out an entire wifi network in an old pre-war building in europe. The client wants around 15 devices phisically connected via cable to form a big mesh wifi network with guest wifi and software to manage the entire mesh. The problem is that my networking education ended at hooking up single home setups, not entire mesh networks. 
Could you guys help me with planning this thing out? Should I just go with 15 routers hooked up to eachother via cable? Or should I go with one big industrial router and 14 APs? I am totally lost with this. 
My budget is unlimited however i would like to keep it under 10k PLN (2500$)

[Sir Asvald]

5 hours ago, Alfa229 said:

Could you guys help me with planning this thing out? Should I just go with 15 routers hooked up to eachother via cable? Or should I go with one big industrial router and 14 APs? I am totally lost with this. 

15 routers?! you dont need that many. You need only 1 router and multiple APs. Why exactly 14 APs? how big is this place..

 

 

[Donut417]

Adding in to what @Sir Asvald stated above. You need to do a site survey. This is where you take an AP and check the range in a given area. Then you take that info and it should provide you with how many AP's you need. The signals should overlap BUT you dont want too many AP's as they will cause issues with interference.

[Alfa229]

On 5/24/2024 at 3:36 PM, Sir Asvald said:

15 routers?! you dont need that many. You need only 1 router and multiple APs. Why exactly 14 APs? how big is this place..

 

 

Yeah the place is quite big, it's a pre-war theatre with thick brick walls and around 8000 m^2 of area to cover. That includes three floors and multiple smaller rooms. So the plan is now to find one router and buy 3 AP's to conduct some tests. The question is, where should i even start looking for a router that will handle the load of the entire theatre

[Cdog580]

If you are looking for a relatively easy out of the box solution, Uniquiti may be a great option for you. You can use one of their routers or gateways to do all of the routing and control the APs (access points). From there, like mentioned above you need to do a site survey to decide how many APs you are going to place, where you are going to place them, and how you are going to hard wire them. Ubiquiti APs run off of POE so luckily you'll only need one cable to each one. Your stack will look something like this:

 

ISP modem or connection > Unifi router (dream machine or along those lines) > network switch with POE ports > Each port to a AP. 

 

Keep in mind that if they already have network infrastructure you will just need to tie into that. Use a POE switch like above and use something like a cloud key to run their configuration software. 

 

Here is a Lawrence systems video of a 52 AP deployment they did: 

 

Hopefully that's enough to get you started. Regardless of AP company, you need to have something with central management to take care of all of those APs and configure them or it's going to be a nightmare. 

 

Good luck!

[Echothedolpin]

How many clients are you expecting to have in this place?

 

Just a reminder that mesh networks tend to degrade in quality once you start getting over a couple dozen devices+infrastructure.