Hi guys,
I'm sure this has been answered on here already, but I've been reading old threads and getting more and more confused!
I've recently moved back in with my parents and am trying to improve the rather poor wireless network coverage and performance here.
The house is quite large and is made of stone, so getting wireless signals through the walls is more difficult than in modern houses. Currently we have three access points, two old and unreliable D-Link b/g models and a more modern Belkin 300n (2.4GHz) model. These are spread around the house and linked together via 100mbit Cat5.
Typical clients in use are laptops (some with 5GHz 802.11n cards, some without), mobile phones, and tablets, as well as a wireless bridge for a PVR with ethernet port.
The issues that we're facing that I'd like to try and resolve are:
1. Poor network coverage/performance in remote areas of the house (typical symptoms are phones that just about negotiate a connection but then struggle to transfer any meaningful data.
2. Mobile devices 'hanging on' to associated access point to the bitter end, rather than switching to a much stronger signal, when roaming.
3. Persistent connections dropping when roaming between access points.
Addressing these points in turn:
1. I am already planning on replacing at least the 2 D-Link b/g routers, as they are very unreliable and 'disappear' a lot, requiring a reboot. I'd like to upgrade everything to support 300n speeds. There is minimal Wifi interference here (i.e. no other APs in range other than our own) so am I right in thinking that 5GHz kit will give us little benefit?
I'm guessing I should be looking at access points with a high transmit power (possibly via firmware hacks?), and that can also accept an aftermarket antenna (5dBi or so?) to increase the coverage range to the extremes of the house. Does anyone have any recommendations?
2/3. I understand there are technologies such as Fast Roaming Support which can do access point handover in 50ms, however, this requires enterprise-class equipment and is overkill for our usage -- handover in a couple of seconds would suffice. It would be nice if long-running connections (SSH sessions, etc.) would persist, if possible.
My understanding is that the best way to do this is to have all the access points using the same SSID and encryption settings -- is this correct? Should the access points be on the same channel or non-overlapping channels? Is there any better way of doing this -- I've tried both same-channel and different-channel settings on the current kit, but it's not behaving very nicely, however, this may be due to the age of the access points.
Is handover/roaming support any better using something like WDS? Having the ability to place wired access points around the house makes me steer away from repeater technology, but overall throughput on the network is, while desirable, not critical, so if we had better roaming capability using WDS I may consider this instead.
I realise there's a lot of questions in here, so any help with any of them would be much appreciated!
I'm sure this has been answered on here already, but I've been reading old threads and getting more and more confused!
I've recently moved back in with my parents and am trying to improve the rather poor wireless network coverage and performance here.
The house is quite large and is made of stone, so getting wireless signals through the walls is more difficult than in modern houses. Currently we have three access points, two old and unreliable D-Link b/g models and a more modern Belkin 300n (2.4GHz) model. These are spread around the house and linked together via 100mbit Cat5.
Typical clients in use are laptops (some with 5GHz 802.11n cards, some without), mobile phones, and tablets, as well as a wireless bridge for a PVR with ethernet port.
The issues that we're facing that I'd like to try and resolve are:
1. Poor network coverage/performance in remote areas of the house (typical symptoms are phones that just about negotiate a connection but then struggle to transfer any meaningful data.
2. Mobile devices 'hanging on' to associated access point to the bitter end, rather than switching to a much stronger signal, when roaming.
3. Persistent connections dropping when roaming between access points.
Addressing these points in turn:
1. I am already planning on replacing at least the 2 D-Link b/g routers, as they are very unreliable and 'disappear' a lot, requiring a reboot. I'd like to upgrade everything to support 300n speeds. There is minimal Wifi interference here (i.e. no other APs in range other than our own) so am I right in thinking that 5GHz kit will give us little benefit?
I'm guessing I should be looking at access points with a high transmit power (possibly via firmware hacks?), and that can also accept an aftermarket antenna (5dBi or so?) to increase the coverage range to the extremes of the house. Does anyone have any recommendations?
2/3. I understand there are technologies such as Fast Roaming Support which can do access point handover in 50ms, however, this requires enterprise-class equipment and is overkill for our usage -- handover in a couple of seconds would suffice. It would be nice if long-running connections (SSH sessions, etc.) would persist, if possible.
My understanding is that the best way to do this is to have all the access points using the same SSID and encryption settings -- is this correct? Should the access points be on the same channel or non-overlapping channels? Is there any better way of doing this -- I've tried both same-channel and different-channel settings on the current kit, but it's not behaving very nicely, however, this may be due to the age of the access points.
Is handover/roaming support any better using something like WDS? Having the ability to place wired access points around the house makes me steer away from repeater technology, but overall throughput on the network is, while desirable, not critical, so if we had better roaming capability using WDS I may consider this instead.
I realise there's a lot of questions in here, so any help with any of them would be much appreciated!