I'm looking for some product recommendations. I'm going to be installing 5-8 WAPs in a building, and this time I'd like to look into using a wireless access point controller to manage all the devices. Does anyone have a good recommendation for a controller and the WAPs to go with them?

I've only done a small amount of research so far, but all I'm seeing are controllers that are going for around $4K. Is that what I should expect? Are there cheaper alternatives? I just know that the client most likely will not be interested in spending that much...

I'm curious: what significant benefit do you expect to get with a controller? I couldn't justify it last time I looked into it.

I have been playing with a pair of standalone Cisco Aironet 1600 APs with a SG300 POE switch.

The 1600s support server authentication so I wouldn't need to deploy a preshared key (if I set up a radius server). snmp for monitoring and alerting. With POE I can power cycle them from the switch.

Will the environment evolve so much that occasionally touching 5-8 routers is more expensive than a controller? Editing a half dozen configs and uploading/saving them one by one goes pretty quickly. (I managed 20ish 2600 routers that way a few years ago with no trouble.)

As I say, I haven't used a controller, and I'd like to learn more.

-jk

Now that you talk about it, I think you're right. There's probably not much need for a controller. I'll check out those WAPs you mentioned, though. Thanks!

Controllers are necessary to do roaming well. Wifi clients get to decide which AP they want to talk to, and if they're connected to one they don't usually go looking to connect to another until they lose the signal entirely. So if you're on your phone and walk across the building, you'll still be attached to the original AP even though you may be standing next to a much stronger signal. A controller can notice this and bump you off the original AP so your phone connects to the strongest AP around.

Controllers are also just convenient so you don't have to do the same setup N times.

I've used both Cisco and Ruckus, and I'd probably go with Cisco at this point. I would have tried Meraki before they got acquired by Cisco, but would be a little hesitant now. (the Ruckus controller didn't do roaming two years ago - it's possible it does now. Ruckus is really aimed at large outdoor coverage areas - cisco is aimed more at dense office buildings)

Thanks. The few multi-AP installs I've done haven't needed much roaming, so it hasn't come up before and they haven't noticed any trouble.

-jk

Does anyone have any experience with the Ubiquiti UniFi system? It seems to be exactly what I need...

From my research, it sounds like this UniFi system is pretty much exactly what I need. It can do PoE either through included adapters or a new switch, it handles wireless roaming, and if necessary I can connect to APs wirelessly. I don't know if it uses WDS for this, but it sounds like I can either connect two units on the 5GHz channel (if I get APs with 5GHz), and use the 2.4GHz channel for the clients. Pretty nifty...

I see that it also requires either an on-site PC running their software, or some sort of hosted account. I think the easiest would be the on-site PC, which would certainly cost less than most controllers I'm seeing.

So nobody here has experience with the UniFi products? Has anyone heard anything positive or negative about them? They seem like a pretty nice solution to me. I might even put a couple in my own home...

This message posted from a UniFi network I just set up. Details to follow...

Ooo! Exciting! Thanks...

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.

Thanks for the update. So...thumbs up?

I love the use case, installing WiFi for an airbnb residence with potential for access at a farmer's market. That's really neat.

I noticed that Ubiquiti had payment plugins, but I wasn't quite sure what that was for. That makes sense. Very smart to offer paid WiFi.

Do you think you'll try setting up another access point wirelessly? I noticed that they said this could be done with their "mesh" technology, but I'm not sure what they mean by that. If it's not using WDS, what else could it be?

I'll be curious how that outdoor unit works. I might need to install that for a client too.

All in all, how easy is it to set up? How easy would it be with and without the EC2 hosted controller? I've never worked with that before. Anyway, the place I'm installing the system can easily stick a computer somewhere, so I won't need to host it. I'm assuming that would be pretty straightforward. Did you find it fairly simple to set up? I imagine it's harder than setting up your average router, but how much more so?

More and more, I'm thinking about installing a system in my home. I was in my garage yesterday streaming podcasts, and the WiFi signal was very weak, even though I wasn't all that far from an AP. I'd love to place these all over the house and have one single well-functioning network, with a similarly strong guest network.

So far, it's a thumbs-up. The hardware itself is quite inexpensive and the Apple gear still has value on ebay. Overall, we're in better shape than before for a small investment in money and time.


I believe that I read Ubiquiti have a dual-band AP that uses the 5GHz band solely for the link between APs. Then it's 2.4GHz-only to the clients. That seems like it could be a good idea for some installs, but we can easily run Cat-5 outside. Since it's PoE, there's just one cable for data and power. If it's possible to hardwire something, that's always best.


I do have experience with other cloud hosting services, but this was my first time working with EC2. It was very simple, but requires a basic understanding of setting DNS records to do it right. Since a working image with the controller software was provided already, there is no need to work with the Linux command line and install anything. You just need to install the image, give it a static IP, and optionally point a DNS A-record to it for a domain name.

The controller software obviously has a Windows and OS X version. You could easily use those options for something on-site, but I have no experience with it. Thinking logically, an install with local controller should be simpler. However, I found the cloud-based install to be a piece of cake.

When setting up the APs for cloud hosting, there is a Discovery application I ran on my laptop (OS X). It will list all the APs on your LAN yet to be configured or adopted by a controller. This youtube video shows what's involved with adopting an AP to a cloud controller.

As far as being harder to set up than a consumer router, I should be clear that these devices are not routers. You will still need a separate router and set that up properly before-hand. That said, all the configuration is done on the controller software. Since these APs are meant to be run as a system, they all have the same configuration with regards to SSIDs and passwords. When you successfully adopt a UniFi AP to your controller, it will automatically be provisioned by the controller with your settings. Adopting the AP to the controller is basically a two-step process. Give the AP the URL of your controller using the Discovery application, then command the controller to adopt the AP. After that, the controller will update the AP's firmware, provision it, reboot it, and then you'll be in business. It takes very little time per AP, and I'm impressed with the way it all worked.

Thanks, Rob! This is extremely valuable feedback for me.

Yeah, I knew I'd need a router, but I wanted to get a point of comparison. It sounds like I shouldn't have too much trouble setting this up at my knowledge level.

Unfortunately, those dual-band APs are super expensive (well, compared to their other APs). The regular APs seem to go for around $82, the "long range" APs are ~$95, and I haven't seen the dual-band APs for less than around $220. I saw that stuff about using the 5GHz range for the backbone, and that's pretty cool. I'm not sure how it works on the 2.4GHz-only APs, though.

Okay, this rocks. It sounds like this is a pretty great system. I definitely plan to pick up a few APs for my own home at some point.


From what I've been seeing, it sounds like the controller isn't, strictly speaking, necessary to the everyday operations of the APs. From what I've been reading. The controller is necessary for setting the network up (of course), and the only reason it needs to be running constantly is if you're running a guest network. I guess you need it in your situation, and I'd need one in my home to provide guest access. I wonder, though. The FAQ says the controller is necessary for a guest portal. By portal, do they mean like the type of setup you're talking about for that farmer's market? Or do they mean just a regular old guest network (SSID, client isolation)? I guess I'll find out sometime if my client accepts my proposal and/or I set up a network in my own house.

I'm planning to rearchitect my home network with dual-band 802.11ac and, hopefully, a single centrally-placed AP rather than two APs in opposite corners of the house. Would I still want to go with the UniFi AP or would that be overkill? I'm willing to run wires and otherwise make a mess to get this done properly. I've never been entirely happy with my dual AP solution.

I use a single Asus RT-AC66U at my condo. It's running stock firmware and is perfectly stable and feature-filled.

I don't have any 802.11ac clients to test with, but the 802.11b/g/n range has been fantastic. I'm on the 3rd floor of a brick and stucco building. I can easily get a usable signal in my garage on the ground floor. I can drive maybe 100 ft away before losing signal on my phone.

Dan, it really comes down to the building structure. Honestly, I couldn't say how any access point using any 802.11_ standard will fare in your specific location. There's just so many variables that it really isn't possible.

In regards to the improvements you're trying to make, the UniFi system wouldn't give you any advantages if you're only going to install one AP, IMO.

Our house is all wood construction. Signals from the top-floor closet, where the router currently lives, already make it to the downstairs far corner, but they're not very good. I'm modestly confident that a high quality AP placed in a central location can work here -- the stairs from the ground to 2nd floor are wide open, so an AP on the ceiling would have at most one wall between itself and the bulk of the house. I don't know which vendor makes the "best" AP, but if I'm going to be running a cable through the attic and cutting a hole in the ceiling, I don't mind spending the extra bucks to "do it right". Once.

Hey, it might work. If it were me, though, knowing how finicky wireless networking is, I'd cover my bases. Especially if I were running cable already, I'd just go all out and run it to the farthest points, then stick the access points at those locations. If you get a new AP/router, you may end up with something that has a different antenna design and signal range.

Does anyone here know about the properties of ac? I seem to recall that while n technically has greater range, it has more trouble with obstructions. Is that the case? How does ac do?

Even wood framed houses have a lot of more substantial stuff here and there - wires, plumbing, ducts, radiators, appliances, etc. And if you add cordless phones and a microwave oven into the mix, it can get worse.

My rental is an older house with paper thin walls, but I still have a couple weak/dead zones, even though I can reach a good 75-100 feet outside my house in other directions. I think one is caused by a combined shadow of the refrigerator and stove/hood/vent (almost side-by-side), two flues in cavities behind them, and some bathroom fixtures. In a room 10 feet over from that problem area, I get a full signal.

We're in a rental while renovating our house: I'll have a pair of hard-wired APs when we move back in in a month or so. They'll be POE, mounted in a couple closets, one on the first floor and one at the other end of the house on the second floor. As near as I can tell, everywhere in the house will have good angles for solid coverage from one or the other, as should the back deck.

-jk

My house is just the opposite. There is so much steel and concrete in it that a WRT54GL router or a cordless phone won't reach from one room to another.

The ceilings/floors are 14" steel-reinforced [not just rebar but heavy I-beams] concrete and the walls are similarly constructed. It was a big shock to the man who installed a split A/C system last year when he found out how difficult it was to make a three-inch hole through an outside wall for the coolant and drain lines.

The man who built the house is an engineer by education, a contractor by avocation, and lived in the house for six years before selling it to me. He had this idea that a house should be built really strong, and it is!

The downside is that the entire house is a sounding board. There is NO wood construction, it is all concrete and masonry and steel, and if someone in the basement scrapes a chair moving away from the table, I will hear it quite plainly on the fourth floor. No big deal, after a while I don't even notice, and there is so much other noise going on around here... even though the town square is a kilometer [almost exactly, give or take 10 meters] away, because of the layout of the streets and the shape of the arroyos on the hill where I live, when they have a concert I can hear every note. Twelve times a day (more on Sundays) the bells in the big church tower ring out the call to Mass, three calls for each. Religious festivals (this is Mexico; there are lots of festivals) are accompanied by cohetes. These are rockets that go about 400 feet in the air then explode with enough violence to rattle my sliding glass doors. By common understanding they don't start these before six in the morning, and they rarely shoot them off much after midnight. Some days the house will be rocked by more than 100 such explosions. Another aspect of the religious celebrations involves roving mariachi bands that wander the neighborhoods, sometimes starting at six am. Most of them don't play very well, but they make up for it with volume. Lots of houses in the neighborhood keep chickens, and forget the old wives tale about roosters crowing at sunup. These babies crow 24 hours a day! Somewhere about two blocks east of me someone has a donkey that breaks out into donkey-song four or five times a day at any time of day or night. Oh, and let's not forget the guy who is teaching himself how to play the trombone. He's over on the next block and isn't allowed to play it inside the house, so he goes out and stands on his [flat] roof to practice. Six days a week, regular as clockwork, he serenades the neighborhood for an hour or so starting at 4 pm. He started out as a rank beginner and over the past few months has gotten substantially better at it. Closer to home (like five feet from my picture windows) I usually have twenty or thirty hummingbirds attacking the bird feeders. In terms of noise per cubic inch of body size, they're probably at the top of the heap.

And you know what? I love every bit of it! In my 68 years I have never enjoyed living anywhere as much as I enjoy it here.

tanstaafl.

Well.. after Alaska..

Very interesting. I would have thought it would be the opposite.

I would have guessed that concrete walls and steel rebar would have reduced vibrations transmitted through the house, by virtue of being stiffer than wood and drywall.

I had always dreamed that someday I would build a house that didn't transmit vibrations and noise the way regular houses did. That way it could have a recording studio, but the other household members wouldn't have to be quiet when tracking. I had always imagined the whole thing would be solid concrete. But from what you're saying, it sounds like that wouldn't work.

Dan, IMO WiFi is so unpredictable, there's no harm in erring on the side of greater coverage. Things could change even as people and furniture move through the house. Personally, I'd install two APs in a five story house.

Well, I've got two APs now, so it's not exactly the end of the world to stick with that architecture. The question then is whether the UniFi architecture is still overkill or whether it's worth the bother.

I don't think it's overkill at $85 per AP. The consumer price level is one of the great things about UniFi, and the first thing that drove me to it. The last thing I was looking for was to at least get second-hand impressions of it from someone I trust when it comes to these things. Luckily, Rob had used it. Thanks, Rob!

It doesn't seem like my client is going to be going with the system. I think they weren't expecting how much it was going to cost to do a building their size. Oh well. I'll try it with my own home and get some first hand experience playing around with it.

The are two possible origins of noise in your house. Noise by air and noise by contact. Noise by air is the easiest to get rid of. Eg. If a neighbour is playing loud music, just close the window. In a concrete house, the effect of closing the window will be larger (read: the volume will become lower) than with a wooden house, because of the density of the material. Because there is a lot more "air" inside wood (read: the micro "pores" in wood are a lot larger than in concrete), normal noise can travel through it easier than with more denser materials like concrete. Also low-frequency sounds travel better through materials than high-frequency sounds. (everybody who has neighbours with a subwoofer setup knows this)

To understand this, you have to know how sounds travel. We all know here that sound travelling is no more than air that gets moved. Every material our there has pores in it, and thus contains air. With some materials out there, like lead, these pores are so incredibly small, they are hardly noticeable under a microscope. But they are there. This is the density of the material. The less pores/smaller the pores, the denser the material is.

Now, with smaller pores, the material contains less air, and so sound doesn't travel as good though it.

HOWEVER... there is also noise by contact. And here the situation is reversed. Because the material is do dense (and contains extremely small pores and thus little air), noise is able to travel trough the material much like the way electricity travels through copper wire. This is what you get when living in a entirely concrete apartment, and the downstairs neighbour moves a chair without lifting if from the floor... you be able to hear the screeching sound as it it was in your own apartment. (Same with fireworks: lots of air gets moved) The air in wood construction works as an insulator and dampens this effect.

So it's always a tradeoff, materials with of lot of air in them (wood, insulation, ...) are good at dampening contact noise. As a bonus they insulate heat better as well. Materials that are denser (concrete, steel, ...) are good are blocking out air noise. However, they don't insulate heat very good and are bad at blocking out contact noise.

Again, the story of the air. There is no better insulator out there than "non moving air". So if you want to create a good thermal isolator, you need to create a material that is capable of "capturing" as many "little bubbles of air" as it can. The more the material is able to hold, the better the heat insulator will be. So heat insulation materials are no more than plates of captured air. That's why they are so light. They are the worst at blocking out noises though, because the air in them lets everything pass through.

The best noise insulator is actually lead, because of the density of the material. Should you want to create a silent room (for air noises!), and you put slabs of lead on all the walls and ceilings, I can guarantee you the room will become unnervingly quiet. Of course, it would cost you a ton of money and lead is also not the easiest material to work with because it's so heavy. The cell phone/WiFi reception is that room would also suck.

The solution: make a combination of both. Eg. Build a concrete house, and put a lot of insulation around it. What also gets done, mostly in apartments, are the so called "floating floors". This means that the floors are not just built with concrete, but in the areas where the floors touch the walls, an insulator is put in between to separate both from one another (and so contact noise cannot travel any further). If it's not done is this fashion during construction and you live with a noisy upper neighbour, you could always eg. create a fake ceiling with insulation in it to get rid of the air noises, but because the ceiling is essentially not separated from the walls with an insulator, you'll never get rid of the contact noise. I hope this makes sense.


As you can read above, it would work. You just have to do it the right way. Concrete is also still my building material of preference, because it's got a lot more benefits than downsides. It's just that blocking our contact noises isn't one of them. But as I've explained, this can be remedied if this is taken into account when the house is getting built. This is crucial, because you'll never be able to fix it to a satisfactory level afterwards, because you won't be able to reach the core of the problem anymore (well, not without tearing it completely down again, that is...)

Right, I hate the way that metal things aren't airtight. Oh wait... they are.


Ah, that's a bit more like it. Different materials have different conductivity for sound, for vibration. Masonry, including concrete, stone, and brick, conducts sound very poorly. Metal, including rebar, is "sonorous", which is to say that it conducts sound very well, despite being denser than masonry. (Church bells are made of metal, not concrete. They aren't made of lead, because lead's too soft, but if they were made of iridium or osmium, the densest metals, they'd work fine. Until they were nicked by metal thieves, of course.)

It'll be all the steelwork, not the concrete, that's conducting all the sound-waves through Doug's apartment block.

Peter

You are right of course. This does not apply to metals. Sorry about that.


Correct here also. Most concrete is reinforced concrete, with metal nets in it. I don't agree though that it's the only reason, because you'll see the same effect with masoned walls without any metal in them. But I would agree that, for concrete walls that do contain metal it'll be a lot worse because metal enhances this effect.

Of course, having been there, I can assure you that the building materials have nothing to do with how the sound gets in. The house is quite open/glass on the side that faces town. Like standing and shouting in the mouth of a cave, the concrete simply ensures that the sound bounces around nicely once it's in there.