Home network upgrade recommentations

[hulkster]

Hi, I’d like to ask for your recommendations for upgrading my current home network infrastructure/setup. I’ll try to provide detailed information but if I’ve left out anything crucial, please let me know.

Location

I live in Poland, Europe in a 125 m2 (1345 ft2) 2-story house. All the walls (including the interior) are made from Porotherm bricks.

The 2nd story floor is concrete, the attic floor is wooden.

The attic is connected with the main living room on the ground floor via an Ethernet cable. It will be highly problematic for me to install additional ethernet cables/ports at this point.

ISP

My current internet connection is a radio 40Mbps link. The radio antenna is on the roof, with the AP located in the attic. I plan to upgrade to LTE link (and then 5G) once the operator offers are attractive enough. The LTE modem will most likely also be located in the attic for better link speeds.

Current Infrastructure

Asus RT-N66U acts as the main router and is in the attic. There’s also an Asus EA-N66 located in the main living room on the ground floor, connected to the Dark Knight via an ethernet cable. The RT-N66U provides 2 wireless networks (both 2.4GHz and 5GHz) for the 2nd floor and the EA-N66 provides 2.4GHz one for the ground floor. The 5GHz network from the Dark Knight has almost no coverage (accessible only from small area on the 2nd floor) and the EA-N66 can only provide 2.4 as the 5GHz did not reach all necessary areas.

As for the client devices, I have multiple PCs (laptop and desktop), smartphones, smart TV, smart home devices.

What’s worth noting is that one of the PCs in the house is my work machine. It is located on the 2nd floor and requires very stable connection. When I’ve first set up my home office, I’ve used TP-Link WN722N as the wireless card but the connection with the Dark Knight was not strong enough, so I’ve upgraded to Asus USB-N14. The connection is mostly stable now.

Current problems

Here are the problems I have with the current setup:

• 2 separate Wireless networks cause problems for me when moving around the house with smartphones. When I switch floors, the smartphone stays connected to the previously connected WiFi network. The signal strength is show as quite high but there must be some serious interference along the way as no/very little actual traffic makes it to/from the device. Neither the operating system nor the apps recognize that there are connection problems so the smartphones don’t switch networks nor even change to mobile (this is not entirely true as after several minutes they will eventually recognize that something is wrong and switch to mobile and after further several minutes will change the network, but this is far from desirable). I have tried lowering transmission power in both devices and experimented with roaming assistant on the Dark Knight but the power level when wifi switching was working correctly on the smartphones caused the work PC connection to no longer be stable (and also there was no longer any wireless coverage in certain parts of the house) so I have went back to full power.
• The 2 separate wireless networks cause problems with some devices that do not work with each other if they are connected to different ones. For examples, I have multiple Chromecasts throughout the house and would like for all of them to play the same music, but this does not work if they are in different networks.
• The wireless link speed between my main PC (the work and gaming machine) and Smart TV is about 20Mbit (the connection is PC > RT-N66U > EA-N66 > TV). I’d like to run Steam on PC and mirror the screen to the Android TV via a steam link but the speed is too low.

When considering buying new devices I’d rather have something more expensive but of higher quality and lasting longer. I’ve bought the N66U in 2013 and it has served me well throughout the years. Since I’m a big fan of Merlin firmware, I would lean towards ASUS devices, but I’m open to suggestions.

I think that’s it. I would very much like to hear your recommendations about how I can improve my setup. Thank you in advance.

 

[HellDiver]

Pair of modern Asus routers in AiMesh.

I've had great success with the RT-AX56U running the latest beta firmwares (AiMesh 2.0), both at my house (2x56U) and at mother-in-law's house which uses the same brick (they're call Poraton here, and they seem to suck up wifi like nothing else) - there I'm using 3x56U.

Considering myself and the wife are working from home, so have two work laptops and two phones each, plus our own laptops, tablets, Chromecasts, etc, etc, AiMesh has worked great. I am using ethernet backhaul across a 5GBe link between the upstairs and downstairs switches.

 

[L&LD]

@hulkster, welcome to the forums!

I would suggest a pair of RT-AX58U's, RT-AC86U's, or RT-AX86U's, depending on your budget. I would also only use/test one (of each pair) before opening the other box (a single device may be all you need).

I would also consider using one or more of the old Dark Knight's as Media Bridge's too for your wired-capable devices.

AiMesh AC86U + AC68U Issue

Hi people how is it going? So I've moved to a different place and purchased a second hand AC68U to put in one of the bedrooms to expand the Wifi coverage in the new apartment. I've got an AC86U in the living room as my main router. So i connected the AC68U as an AiMesh node and put it in the...

www.snbforums.com

The current RMerlin 386.1 Beta 4 (or 4b, depending on the router) is stable enough to depend on today. The AiMesh v2.0 features it offers are great.

New M&M 2020

M&M 2020 Specifics

How to Connect an AiMesh Node

L&LD | SmallNetBuilder Forums

 

[hulkster]

Hi

Thanks very much for your recommendations and thank you L&LD for the articles linked.

Great idea about using the Dark Knight as a Media Bridge for the main PC. This will definitely improve the connection.

I'm on a lookout for a good discounts for one of the models mentioned by you.