New house setup (mesh?)

[Floh]

Hi there,

 

never tried the LTT forums, but the community seems pretty cool, and there might be good advice here.

 

I will move into a new house soonish. Obviously, I will want good networking (ethernet and WiFi) throughout the house. Just like my current house, it is German built and there is basically no chance of EM waves making it through ceilings/floors and even some walls, so I will likely need several access points on each floor of the house (4 floors in total). In my current house, I have one dedicated ethernet router in the basement and put ethernet cables to every floor, where a bunch of WiFi routers act as APs for all the devices. The problem with that is that all devices that we carry around (phones, tablets, Steam Decks are particularly bad at this...) will try to cling to the AP that they last connected to and actually have really bad reception and connection speed right next to another AP.

 

The new house I am not building myself, so sadly there is no ethernet throughout and on every floor. I had three ideas for the network setup, and maybe somebody with more experience can help me pick the best?

 

1. The lazy setup: Get powerline adapters for every floor and one in the basement. Have a router in the basement and run ethernet through the powerlines in the house, with switches and access points on each floor. This will likely have the same issue as before with devices clinging to APs, but it will probably kind of work. Though I don't know how fast and reliable the ethernet via powerline stuff is.
2. The mesh setup: Don't try to route cables through the house, but use a WiFi-mesh-setup, likely with extra access points in the staircase to carry good signal across floors. This might solve the issue with devices clinging to one AP from what I understand, since those mesh setups will hand over their connection. But I honestly don't know how horrible the connection and latency will be if I connect a PC in the top floor and the signal will go through 4-5 access points before arriving at the router (and NAS) in the basement. That might be pretty bad.
3. The "lotta work" setup: just put CAT 7 cables throughout the house walls and have several RJ45 plugs on every floor. Lots of work, lots of cost, and if I pick this, does anybody know how I can get the access points to communicate and hand over connections from mobile devices? Or force the mobile devices to pick the closest AP with the best WiFi signal instead of clinging to an old one?

 

This is gonna be a bigger project, so I would like to start out properly. And maybe someone even has a fourth of fifth suggestion for a good house network setup.

 

Thanks in advance. And sorry for the wall of text, there were quite a few things I wanted to say for context.

[NobleGamer]

3 hours ago, Floh said:

never tried the LTT forums, but the community seems pretty cool, and there might be good advice here.

Welcome to the forums!

 

3 hours ago, Floh said:

The problem with that is that all devices that we carry around (phones, tablets, Steam Decks are particularly bad at this...) will try to cling to the AP that they last connected to and actually have really bad reception and connection speed right next to another AP

If such "mobile" devices themselves are inclined to do this, there's no 100% guarantee that simply buying any mesh setup will resolve that. Usually we can't fix stupid (devices), but there are things to look for that can mitigate it. Depending on device OS, there might be some apps that allow more granular prioritization of wifi behavior, though I don't know what those are.

 

There are multiple factors for mobile devices transitioning between networks - I replied to a similar post recently:

• Does the AP/router have a specific protocol (802.xxxxx) or a proprietary way to handoff a device from one source to another? If they're not the same brand and don't mention such a thing, then see if they have a proprietary way to do this.
• Does the AP router have a proprietary way of kicking a device off their 6, 5, and/or 2.4 GHz based on device's signal strength decreasing or increasing? Some router/AP makers like ASUS have this.
• Whether the router & AP are from the same maker or not, how smart or dumb are they in auto-detecting which wifi channel number and width to use? And if dumb, how much risk does that create of overlapping channels & interference? This determines whether you either want to force it to select specific channels & channel widths, or whether to get new hardware alltogether.
• How smart or dumb is your device in changing to a better performing wifi band (6, 5, or 2.4) or completely different wifi SSID? This may factor into whether you want to create different SSIDs for each router/AP (not all meshs can do this) or whether to create SSIDs for each band (most wifi can be configured this way).

As for general network topography:

4 hours ago, Floh said:

The lazy setup: Get powerline adapters for every floor and one in the basement. Though I don't know how fast and reliable the ethernet via powerline stuff is.

This varies greatly with house wiring and whether things are on the same breaker box. I've only gotten tens of mbps when I tried it once in a 3 bedroom home, and I haven't heard of other people getting much more than 100 mbps. So this would be a last resort from my POV, and wouldn't be great for NAS use.

 

4 hours ago, Floh said:

The mesh setup: Don't try to route cables through the house, but use a WiFi-mesh-setup, likely with extra access points in the staircase to carry good signal across floors.

But I honestly don't know how horrible the connection and latency will be if I connect a PC in the top floor and the signal will go through 4-5 access points before arriving at the router (and NAS) in the basement. That might be pretty bad.

I agree if you'd actually need that many APs, and you wire NONE of them to each other. You can wire up some to decrease the max number of AP hops.

 

4 hours ago, Floh said:

The "lotta work" setup: just put CAT 7 cables throughout the house walls and have several RJ45 plugs on every floor. Lots of work, lots of cost

Another option you haven't mentioned: Coax networking, MoCA. If you have a bunch of it throughout the house already, that's an option. It can do as much as 2.5 mbps depending on MoCA version of the adapters you buy on each ends of the cable where you want APs/switches/ethernet devices. The MoCA adapters likely cost the same or a bit more than new cat 6, but saved me LOTS of time by not having to rip out coax and secure & seal new cat 6.

 

If you pick CAT 7, building code requires certain cable material types, or you want to "future proof", then sure that would cost more. If you want to save some money with cat 6/6e over cat 7, just make sure you understand the real world throughput within your LAN (like to your NAS) and to/from the internet, to know whether cat 6 would bottleneck anything.

[ChrisLoudon]

19 minutes ago, NobleGamer said:

If such "mobile" devices themselves are inclined to do this, there's no 100% guarantee that simply buying any mesh setup will resolve that.

Agreed.

 

Most of the issues revolving around wireless client devices clinging on for dear life to a pathetic signal are in fact client side rather problems than server (AP) side.

 

You can get some APs that have settings to adjust how aggressively they broadcast their signal (I can't remember what setting its called) but I did have it on a set of Orbi's but if I'm being honest, it didn't make a blind bit of difference.

 

My house is roughly 300 years old and lined with the ashes of the dead where nothing gets in and out and I've tried a number of different solutions.

 

For some reason my old SkyQ Mesh system worked the best in terms of coverage but due to limited speeds, I've settled with a set of Amazon Eero's but they still don't solve the 'roaming' problem.

 

I was lucky enough to have gone through a massive renovation a few years ago so i had the opportunity to Cat6 pretty much every area of the house which I do recommend if you have the opportunity.

 

I have 4 Eero's to cover 2 floors, an outbuilding and the garden which works pretty well with all the APs using a wired-backhaul.

[Floh]

Thanks for the replies!

 

I am leaving my old APs in the old house. They are decent enough at selecting bands and might even have options to hand off devices to another router, since they are all the same brand (TP-Link EAP245) and even have some central configuration utility. But I want to upgrade to at least WiFi 6 anyways, ideally 6E or 7, not only for future proofing but for playing PCVR wirelessly on my Quest 3.  So it'll be all new hardware in the new house.

 

I think in the end, I will settle for putting 2-3 ethernet through to every floor, one for the initial access point and a couple for PCs from which I want to do some major throughput to the NAS. And then a mesh setup with 2-3 APs for every floor, that'll do fine for all the phones etc. It's not about the internet bandwidth (broadband is honestly horrible here in Germany), but more about the intranet speed, (only HD) video editing off the NAS and wireless PCVR streaming and such.

 

Thanks for getting me off the powerline adapter idea, that would not have been a great option. In the end, if I do something half-hearted, I'll have to redo it in a few years anyways. So it's probably gonna be CAT 7...

[Bdavis]

Cat 7 isn't really a common standard. Cat 6E is the highest I would go. If you want faster than 10gb run fiber. Cat 8 does support 40GB but I don't see consumer equipment being developed for those speeds anytime soon if at all.

 

I would recommend a full ubiquiti setup for your install. All your access points are controlled from one central interface.

[Floh]

4 hours ago, Bdavis said:

Cat 7 isn't really a common standard. Cat 6E is the highest I would go. If you want faster than 10gb run fiber. Cat 8 does support 40GB but I don't see consumer equipment being developed for those speeds anytime soon if at all.

 

I would recommend a full ubiquiti setup for your install. All your access points are controlled from one central interface.

Thanks! Yeah, I also just went around looking for cables and figured that Cat 6E should be fine.

 

I'll look into Ubiquiti. LTT seems to be using them in several projects, but I always figured they are way too expensive for normal people. It's nice to have them al centrally controlled, but not really that necessary if I use them as access points and not routers. I was able to do that with my last (much cheaper) set as well, but basically never used it because after they are set up once in a non-professional environment, I only ever changed settings on the router, never the access points.