I installed two UniFi APs this weekend in a house that previously was using two Apple Airport Extremes. The house is about 150 years old, made of brick, and is 4 stories tall. With the Apple hardware, the Extremes were located on the 4th floor (main router) and a closet toward the back of the house on the 2nd floor (hardwired Cat-5e). For now, the UniFi APs were placed in the same locations.

With the Apple hardware, many client devices seemed to prefer connecting to the 4th floor Extreme. The 2nd floor AP was almost worthless. Most people hang out on the 1st floor (kitchen and dining room) and back garden. From the back garden, you can see the closet on the 2nd floor with AP through the window. Still, clients preferred connecting to the 4th floor.

I set up the UniFi APs to connect to a controller running on Amazon EC2. Since the whole house is rented-out on airbnb much of the time, running a PC on-site was not a good option (in my opinion). Ubiquiti publishes micro Linux images on Amazon EC2, so it seemed like the best way to go for this first-time install. The first year of EC2 is free, but (depending on data transfer) might cost around $15 per month once the free period is over. Guests of the house are given full access to the network, but we're considering putting a pay-wall on the guest network to help with the EC2 cost. There's a Saturday farmer's market across the street that might be interested in some cheap-ish wifi access. UniFi supports taking payments via PayPal for this purpose, but we haven't implemented or even tested this yet.

Although it seems like UniFi does a much better job of corralling downstairs/outdoor users to the 2nd floor AP, the range out in the back garden is still poor. The back garden goes back about 50 feet from the house. The closer you are to the house, the poorer the signal. So, it seems the AP is just in a bad location with regards to exterior walls and other obstacles. We plan to put one of the outdoor APs in the back. I have high hopes that this will be the last step on the way to epic whole-house coverage.