I’m thinking about upgrading my W-Fi and I was curious what wireless access points (WAP) people are using. I’m currently using a Netgear R7800 running OpenWRT.
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Unifi. I’ve got a box of APs as ewaste just sitting in the basement. Every so often I would get more ewaste from companies I work with.
I don’t need the most demanding of wifi systems. I hardwire most of my stuff whenever possible. And I have a fairly small home. A single AP on the main floor, 1 AP on the basement. 1 AP in the detached garage.
Most of my wifi devices are iot things on their own vlan.
Omada APs, various versions. Really happy with them, their WiFi is great and unlike Ubiquity they also work without the controller as independent devices.
I have two TP-Link EAP610, one EAP245, and one EAP615-Wall. The Omada controller runs on my home server in an LXC. Three of the units are powered by PoE, and the garage one is meshed in. I needed three in my house because the walls have chicken wire in them which blocks and reflects WiFi. It took some trail and error to get the WAPs in suitable locations. The main one in the basement is under a wall, such that it has line of sight into 5 rooms of the house. I used iPerf to test performance at the edges of each room, until I could get at least 300 Mbit reliably. That was the only way I could ensure that I was getting a direct signal and not a reflection off a wall.
I have one of the mikrotik hap things because it was cheap.
I have 2x Tplink EAP 610 access points. Linking back to an Opnsense virtualized router. The APs are great and Omada is fantastic - I’m running it in a docker container with no cloud access required.
I would go all Omada if I could but that would mean I’d need 3 POE Omada switches and I cant justify that cost at the moment.
And sadly Omada is years behind in their gateway/Firewall. OPNsense is far better in that regard, going back to a Omada gateway is like going back to a tricycle when you drive a car. Sadly.
Ruckus APs with wired backhaul OpnSense box runs the network.
I moved to Rukus from Unifi and the difference is night and day. Unifi does not play nice with Sonos and the firmware is rock solid compared to Unifi.
Is Ruckus not crazy expensive? We used it for customers and they are like €500 an access point.
Used on eBay and flashed with the Unleashed firmware. It’s the same price range as Ubiquiti stuff.
Went all in with UniFi some time back. No regrets.
Currently running a few U6s. No real motivation to upgrade to U7s.
While expensive, UniFi hardware is just a huge step beyond the rest of the consumer market.
I’ve had literally 10x the range (5x vs 50m), in congested environments, compared to ‘gaming’ hardware. I actually did a side by side to test. I was shocked at the difference.
The bridging function is also a life saver. 2 LR units can get a reliable signal between each other, at ridiculous ranges.
+1 on this. Though i picked up 2 u7’s. VLAN support, easy to maintain and lets face it, superior function from most retail APs. If you’re a power user, this is the way.
I’m using a couple of TP-Link EAP225 ceiling-mounted PoE access points, and one EAP235-wall wall-mounted one, connected to my old TP-Link Archer C7 router (with the antennas disabled) running OpenWRT.
I’d like to replace the router with something rack-mounted, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I purchases a few Netgear R6220, and of course flashed OpenWRT on all of them!
Great hardware, cheap, and perfectly supported. A few years old, so I could even find them used at an amazing price point.
I use a cudy wr3000. Great value for the price and features official openwrt support.
2nd hand Ruckus.
They’re decent quality that you’d see in a commercial / enterprise setting (so PoE), but Ruckus also have their “Unleashed” firmware which removes the need for a WLC.
I have 2 in a mesh at home and easily support many IoT devices, phones, laptops, etc on multiple SSIDs
TP link EAP’s and i run the omada software controller on an existing server. Right now I have 3 AP’s and it’s been a great experience so far compared to running consumer wifi routers before. All are on ethernet too.
Same, I needed to expand my Wi-Fi and was to lazy to run an Ethernet and a power cable across the attic. I settled for two TP-Link EAP and a TP-Link managed switch that also provides PoE. You can run all three devices stand alone, but Omada is also quite nice - you can run it without using their cloud on your home server and even connect their app to your local controller.
Fritzbox boxes.
They tick all the checkboxes
- good standards support (including dect protocol if you want to have an ip phone or even iot protocols)
- fast wifi speeds
- cheap (at least for the second hand in ebay)
- super stable, never had a problem with them in 5 years or more
- fast roaming support out of the box
It is a well known brand in Germany but pretty unknown outside that country. Honestly it is the best bang for buck I was able to get.
Honestly, I would spend 10 minutes checking on them
I really like them but they do have two downsides for “more advanced” users (or at least for me) - it is a home device as after all.
- No support for VLAN or VLAN tagging - you can set up you WiFi and a guest WiFi. You can also map the guest network to an Ethernet port. But that’s about it.
- There is no way to change the DNS suffix (*. fritz.box) to another value - I do own a domain that I use for the local services on my home server, etc. which then allows for Let’s Encrypt certificates, but I cannot use it “out of the box”.
If you’re an advanced user, there’s plenty of ways around that, though. I just wished that these two thing were to exist in the firmware to have less work with my home infrastructure.
Totally agree with the first point, it is a limitation, and the guest wifi sticking to a eth port is just a patch. One that works but still a patch.
But I don’t see the point of the prefixes. What do you mean? I also have a custom domain and a local dns server y can use the domain even internally. I just simple ignore that…
Yeah, I’m also using a local resolver. But since I had some problems using another DHCP server (which was probably a problem on my end), so I’m current setting some devices in my FRITZ!box to a fixed IP and then enter that in my DNS server. If I could just skip the second part and tell the FRITZ!Box to just resolve printserver.example.com instead of printserver.fritz.box - that’d be nice. Maybe I should do another try with a DHCP server soon.
I used to use R7800s. Then switched to UAP AC Pro / U6 Pro. Today just tested the OpenWrt One.
- The R7800 (on OpenWrt) is superb, fast, reliable. Can’t say anything bad about it. One of the most successful wireless platforms I’ve used. Probably the best implementation of this chipset too.
- The UAP AC Pro / U6 Pro perform better than the R7800. They have significantly better radio performance. The range is longer, coverage is uniform, performance is more consistent within the covered area. Adding a local Unifi controller (can be done in Docker) adds some nice wireless and management features like band steering. They don’t work well for bridging / mesh though. I had to run a bridge at some point and a set of Unifi had significant latency spikes, making it bad for gaming and other low-latency applications. A R7800-to-R7800 wireless bridge in the same application was superb with consistently low latency. Unifi can be had for cheaper second hand. Lots of corpos have them and old units get dumped upon upgrades.
- The OpenWrt One, through my very limited testing shows great performance in good radio conditions. Once you put some obstacles for the signal, performance degrades much quicker than Unifi U6 Pro. In a particular test where the Unifi achieved 50Mbps, the OpenWrt One did 1.5Mbps. I haven’t compared it to an R7800. I don’t know if it would perform any better with different antennas.
Before that I’ve used R7000, WZR-300HP, WL-500g, WRT54G/L, among others, but none of these are relevant today. :D
Unifi has amazing radio performance, but the software is yucky. and they “recently” (last year?) had a backwards-incompatible update of the controller software which I still didn’t get to migrate.
I’m probably on it already on account that my docker service pulls the latest image on restart. Something I should change.
Mine stopped updating at some point and I’ve read that this one has been discontinued, please migrate to the new one.
Edit: link for reference https://docs.linuxserver.io/deprecated_images/docker-unifi-controller/
Shit. Thank you.
I’m using 3 cheap routers that I bought used. They are all running openwrt and I have set up Dawn so that devices automatically switch to the best one. Wireless speed isn’t as important to me as coverage and this allowed me to cover my entire house and allow access to high speed ethernet from multiple different locations.
which ones?
Just lookup cheap devices that you can purchase in your area and check here to see if it’s supported.
Dawn sounds very interesting. It seems to need 802.11k and 802.11v on all AP-nodes, I am not sure they are supported by my hardware though. I’ve never heard of those standards, so it seems unlikely.
I also just read about a user complaining about crashes related to dawn. Does it run stable and does it also switch to the 5ghz band or does it seem to prefer 2,4ghz, as another user noted three years ago.
