If you're using an Asus router, https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/about is a simple firmware upgrade.
Advantages? If the current official firmware is keeping me going fine is there a good reason for me to switch?
is there a good reason for me to switch?
Not if there's nothing here that compels you. I honestly can't remember what originally inspired me to install it but I've had no troubles with it. If you're interested, I supposed you can always give it a shot and then revert back to the stock firmware later.
Anyone have experience with Google Wifi mesh routers? Now that I'm working from home a lot more, the lag spikes have really started to get to me. It's both in online gaming and when on Zoom video calls. I've troubleshooted to see if its something else on the network and even upgraded my modem (ditched the Comcast modem). Some light research shows that this is a common problem with Google Wifi so I'm tempted to ditch it and try something else.
Is it a problem with the Google product or something endemic to mesh networks in general?
Can you test by running an Ethernet cable? That would rule out the ISP. After that, you'd probably want to disconnect your Google AP and run scanning software to see what the local radio environment looked like. You might be competing with neighbors, particularly on 2.4GHz, which can travel several houses down the street.
I have no specific experience with Google's WiFi in particular, and if you don't see any other problems it might just be a bug in the firmware.
Permanent Ethernet runs are always the best way to do networking if you can, because that puts the entire problem under your control. You don't have to worry about what anyone else is doing or any outside interference, and conditions won't suddenly degrade if a neighbor buys a new wireless gizmo.
The downside to that, of course, is the labor involved in running wires. There's also the cost of wires and jacks, but that's pretty minor compared to the labor.
Can you test by running an Ethernet cable? That would rule out the ISP. After that, you'd probably want to disconnect your Google AP and run scanning software to see what the local radio environment looked like. You might be competing with neighbors, particularly on 2.4GHz, which can travel several houses down the street.
I have no specific experience with Google's WiFi in particular, and if you don't see any other problems it might just be a bug in the firmware.
Permanent Ethernet runs are always the best way to do networking if you can, because that puts the entire problem under your control. You don't have to worry about what anyone else is doing or any outside interference, and conditions won't suddenly degrade if a neighbor buys a new wireless gizmo.
The downside to that, of course, is the labor involved in running wires. There's also the cost of wires and jacks, but that's pretty minor compared to the labor.
Thanks! I'll try some of these things. I was avoiding hardwiring everything due to aesthetics and the labor but understand that might be helpful at least for isolating the problem. FWIW, I also found a Eero system at a good price so I picked it up to replace the Google Wifi system.
One thought - my understanding was that these advanced mesh systems would auto-switch to empty channels without a lot of noise. Maybe that doesn't work as well as expected?
I also have an Eero system. Works well for us. The more expensive tri-band units help.
The problem with auto-switch is that everything is wireless now. There really aren't empty channels anymore in a lot of places -- which is why Malor suggested shutting yours off and scanning.
I also have an Eero system. Works well for us. The more expensive tri-band units help.
The problem with auto-switch is that everything is wireless now. There really aren't empty channels anymore in a lot of places -- which is why Malor suggested shutting yours off and scanning.
Triband is in my opinion a must have feature in a mesh setup. Most devices can't take advantage of it but the mesh devices can use the extra band to communicate with each other freeing up frequency in the other bands for your other devices. That said I am planning on wiring my house up with at 4 to 6 (two behind the TV and maybe two to my PC area and two to my console setup on the other side of the PC area) Cat6A runs this winter (when temperatures in my attic get less oven like).
LilCodger wrote:I also have an Eero system. Works well for us. The more expensive tri-band units help.
The problem with auto-switch is that everything is wireless now. There really aren't empty channels anymore in a lot of places -- which is why Malor suggested shutting yours off and scanning.
Triband is in my opinion a must have feature in a mesh setup. Most devices can't take advantage of it but the mesh devices can use the extra band to communicate with each other freeing up frequency in the other bands for your other devices. That said I am planning on wiring my house up with at 4 to 6 (two behind the TV and maybe two to my PC area and two to my console setup on the other side of the PC area) Cat6A runs this winter (when temperatures in my attic get less oven like).
*Must have unless you have ethernet backhaul 
I was avoiding hardwiring everything due to aesthetics and the labor but understand that might be helpful at least for isolating the problem.
If the budget allows, you could hire pros. The costs used to be about $100/drop for normal houses without anything weird going on, but it's probably higher by now.
We're very happy with our Eero as well. My wife and I have been both working from home with the system for 6 months now and there's rarely a hiccup in spite of us being in video calls and downloading large software packages most of the day. The network covers the entire 2200 square feet and then some with only 1 repeater.
I was avoiding hardwiring everything due to aesthetics and the labor but understand that might be helpful at least for isolating the problem.If the budget allows, you could hire pros. The costs used to be about $100/drop for normal houses without anything weird going on, but it's probably higher by now.
It's not even that. My house is already wired with drops in every room but given the amount of devices and a weird office set-up, I end up with a lot of cables strung along the baseboard. I actually end up wiring all of the mesh network routers together (I know - which kinda defeats one of the values of a mesh network) but devices flow seamlessly around the house.
Malor wrote:I was avoiding hardwiring everything due to aesthetics and the labor but understand that might be helpful at least for isolating the problem.If the budget allows, you could hire pros. The costs used to be about $100/drop for normal houses without anything weird going on, but it's probably higher by now.
It's not even that. My house is already wired with drops in every room but given the amount of devices and a weird office set-up, I end up with a lot of cables strung along the baseboard. I actually end up wiring all of the mesh network routers together (I know - which kinda defeats one of the values of a mesh network) but devices flow seamlessly around the house.
Having your mesh endpoints wired together is basically the optimum way to deploy them from a maximum bandwidth/dependability perspective. If you think of a wireless mesh setup in something like a long ranch style house (my great uncle had a house like this that felt like it was about as long as a football field) depending on placement of your endpoints and the main controller you might have a chain of endpoints (i.e. endpoint 3 talks only to endpoint 2 and endpoint 2 talks to endpoint 1 and endpoint 1 talks to the main controller) talking to each other thus increasing latency and the chances for packets to get dropped/corrupted/interfered with.
Malor wrote:I was avoiding hardwiring everything due to aesthetics and the labor but understand that might be helpful at least for isolating the problem.If the budget allows, you could hire pros. The costs used to be about $100/drop for normal houses without anything weird going on, but it's probably higher by now.
It's not even that. My house is already wired with drops in every room but given the amount of devices and a weird office set-up, I end up with a lot of cables strung along the baseboard. I actually end up wiring all of the mesh network routers together (I know - which kinda defeats one of the values of a mesh network) but devices flow seamlessly around the house.
Yeah, it's pretty normal to have a snarl of Ethernet wiring. Sometimes you can simplify the cabling a little by going with bigger switches; perfectly competent 16-port jobs are under $100 these days. But sometimes there's just no helping it, as every wired device needs at least one wire.
As Rykin says, a wired backbone is typically ideal for a wireless deployment. It means you can spend your whole frequency allocation serving clients, instead of losing a bunch for backhaul between routers.
Unifi is pretty much my favorite hardware these days.. not the crap Amplifi brand they purchased but the Unifi hardware. They have a solid Firewall/Security/Router appliance as well as rock solid Access Points in various form factors and flavors.
But I repeat the suggestions above that where possible Ethernet backhaul works best for AP's over a mesh network.
Update ya'll!
Eero system installed. While it's all hardwired into the gateway hub through a switch, the app still tells me that the two hubs are "wireless". It's working but speeds aren't what they should be through-out the house.
Quick googling said that I should switch it to "bridge" mode but that borked the whole system. Going to poke around a bit more.
Unifi is pretty much my favorite hardware these days
Resurrecting this thread after a couple years dormant to talk about Unifi. I just replaced a couple Netgear wifi router/AP combos (on which I had DD-WRT flashed and set to AP mode) with some Unifi access points. A U6 Long Range for the house, and a U6 Lite for my office (detached casita).
I thought about going 6E, but the only Unifi 6E is the Enterprise, which is expensive. And with Wifi 7 on the verge of ratification and devices expected this year, I figure I would just roll with Wifi 6 now and plan a full-on Wifi 7 upgrade in a couple years when there's a set of Unifi devices to choose from (and while I can still re-sell the Wifi 6 ones at a good price).
Unraid has a community app for running the Unifi Controller software in Docker easily.
More capable wifi is great, even though most of my important stuff is wired. Still, it's nice my wifi clients can better take advantage of my 1GB up/down fiber Internet pipe.
I just upgraded to a dream machine, and it’s everything I needed. So much better than the Netgear mesh system I was using.
I just upgraded to a dream machine, and it’s everything I needed. So much better than the Netgear mesh system I was using.
Once Ubiquiti has a Wifi 7 version of the Dream Router, that's what I'm going to put in at my parents' house to replace their Google Home Wifi.
And since we're on the topic of routers, my router/gateway of choice is pfSense running on one of these mini-PCs.
pfSense is going through a bit of a transition, in that the fully open source Community Edition is kinda being de-emphasized in favor of the freely available (for home and lab use) pfSense Plus, which builds and expands on the open source pfSense with additional closed-source features.
If I was starting from scratch, I would probably consider using OPNsense over pfSense, but I don't want to bring my home router down for an extended period of time to rebuild my gateway with OPNsense. So, my weekend project is probably going to be upgrading from pfSense CE to a free pfSense Plus license.
Whenever I build an upgraded gateway (assuming I don't just switch to a Ubiquiti device), I will probably run a hypervisor so that I can run these gateway software suites as VMs, making it easier to tinker and switch between them.
I run pfSense within a VM on Proxmox with a dedicated two port Ethernet card installed on the system. Since our old Ubiquiti router is still doing DHCP duty, the migration was simply switching over the WAN cable, changing the gateway IP, and turning off the Edgerouter's routing capability. Having a separate DHCP server and a Unifi controller to manage the APs, our LAN is resilient even when the router is down for maintenance.
What do folks like these days for a router? My house is tiny(~1300sqft) and the current ASUS router is centrally located and honestly working fine. It is just old and lacks newer forms of encryption as my iPhone reminds with its "weak security" message under my ssid.
Like I said tiny house so no need for fancy mesh and its only me and my wife so I don't normally have dozens of devices on the wifi.
Given that, what do you think?
You're in luck because relatively new non mesh routers are really affordable compared to mesh systems with similar capabilities.
It'll mostly come down to, do you want to have fine grained control over the features or just set and forget?
Given that, what do you think?
Probably just a newer version of what you already have. A single router-wifi combo device, something with WiFi 6. TP-Link makes some good ones, ASUS makes good ones too and you’re already familiar with them.
I’m personally all about Unifi hardware these days, and having the router and wireless access points as separate devices, but that’s overkill for a smaller living space. My house’s living space is divided up between two stories plus a detached casita, so multiple devices is pretty much mandatory, and Unifi makes that much easier to manage.
Sounds about right. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing out on some new hotness. Thanks!
And with Wifi 7 on the verge of ratification and devices expected this year, I figure I would just roll with Wifi 6 now and plan a full-on Wifi 7 upgrade in a couple years when there's a set of Unifi devices to choose from (and while I can still re-sell the Wifi 6 ones at a good price).
It has been EXACTLY one year since this post, and I looked today and saw Unifi has their first WiFi 7 access point available (though currently sold out from their store). Looks like my time estimate was a little conservative! Now to sign up for stock alerts and snap up three U7 Pros as soon as I can…
... and the U7 Pros are back in stock. Bought. Yay!
The U7 Pros arrived and they're oh so sweet.
It helps to have a DNS record pointing the "unifi" hostname to your Unifi controller (probably happens automatically if you use a Unifi router) and making sure the device communication port remains on 8080, so that APs will find the controller automatically with their default "http://unifi:8080/inform" inform URL, instead of having to remember to SSH into them and change it. (My Unifi controller is in a Docker container on my Unraid server, and I previously had 8080 mapped to a different port because another service was using 8080. No longer!)
It's beautiful...
Beware that it wants more power than, say, a WiFi 5 AC Pro, so you can't just drop it in.
I have PoE+ going to all of my access point drops.
I'm looking to replace my ASUS setup with Ubiquiti as well.
The internet comes in through the garage, via the ISP router. I have one ASUS router setup as access point (because of the 4 LAN ports) in the living room on the same floor, and one out of support ASUS router on the 2nd floor in my home office right now. All rooms are connected through CAT 5 UTP.
I'm looking at the Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud Key Gen2 Plus for the garage, connected to a Unifi Switch Lite for the PoE, from where UTP connections to the other rooms sprout. I would then put a UniFi U6+ AP in the living room and on the 2nd floor to replace the ASUS routers.
There's about 10m/30ft distance between the garage and the living room, and probably about 30m/90ft to the 2nd floor. Would that be an issue to supply PoE to the Access Points?
Currently, both ASUS routers are placed fairly low, so not on the wall or ceiling. Reception is decent enough though, would that be okay for the U6+ AP's as well? Or should I look into placing them higher up?
Thanks for your advice
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