Need another AP...buy another Unifi or two refurb asus?

[whitenack]

Hey All,

I built a house last year and ran cat6 everywhere. I installed a Unifi AC Lite in the ceiling of the living room, which is central to the house. This gets good signal to just about everywhere, except the garage and the back wall of our bedroom which is where our bed sits. The garage is more of a "want" instead of a "need", but we would prefer to have more reliable service while in bed (have a roku, and the "private listening" feature cuts in an out). The service is 95% reliable, so there must be some sort of interference that happens occasionally. It isn't noticeable until we are streaming.

Since I have cat6 throughout the house, I have a couple of different options...

1. I could put another AC Lite in the upstairs hall, which for sure would get signal into the bedroom, but would have a lot of signal overlap from downstairs.

2. I could put an ap just for the bedroom, like an AC IM.

3. I could ditch the Unifi system and go to AI mesh. I currently have an AC66U, but it doesn't look that is currently supported for AI mesh. Still, if I go with the refurb T-Mobile units, I can get 2 routers for the price of one of the Unifis. Plus, if I ever wanted to push out into areas that I didn't have cat6, I could do so by just adding a mesh router.

Thanks

 

[System Error Message]

you can never have too many indoor unifi APs, worst comes to worst you can always use them as light fixtures .

ubiquiti unifi APs dont have mesh so if you buy mesh you may not be able to make use of it straight away. If you're gonna have mesh in the future, get the mesh.

 

[Easy Rhino]

If you already have Cat6 all and a Ubiquiti AP, then I'd get another Ubiquiti to leverage your investment.

If there's too much overlap you could drop the power a little bit.

Note that Asus has started restricting the Tmobile routers' ability to use AIMesh, so making them spoof as a regular AC-86U requires a lot of flashing work that I'm not familiar with the details on. (it's not endorsed by RMerlin).

 

[whitenack]

Thanks for the replies. Easy Rhino, it looks like they already have a workaround for the asus restriction. This guide looks to be pretty reliable.

I guess the real question is whether it is worth it to continue buying the more expensive unifi APs or whether I should switch to the refurb asus. I can buy two asus refurb routers for the price of one unifi AP.

 

[Easy Rhino]

the refurb Tmobile routers are a great deal.

One thing to bear in mind is reliability. The Unifi set has a reliable reputation. The AIMesh has a rep as a work in progress.