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Forum Discussion
Nighthawk or Orbi
Hi all, Looking for advice on a Network setup for our new summer home. The house is 3 levels, approximately 1,200 SF each level. First floor has kitchen, living room, 3 bedrooms. Second floor...
mcervinojr wrote:
Cat5e cable has been run to each floor near the entertainment systems. My question is this: Should I purchase an Orbi system and put the satellites in AP mode or should I go with an router like a R8300 and hardwire a WAC 104 access point on each floor? Worried about coverage, speed and seamless Wifi handoffs.
I also want to be able to have a strong Wifi connection in the yard which extends about 40 feet from the rear of the home.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
the orbi sats do not work connected to ethernet and seeing as you already have structured ethernet they would be a waste and not as functional
all you really need is a wireless router ( because of the 4 ports ) set at each location running in AP mode , something like the netgear r7000 would be fine for this job
back where the ethernet cables terminate you can run a router to control everything , the router could be another netgear r7000 with its wifi on or off , you may already have a wifi router you could use , just remember the router is the most important device in your network so make sure its got a good fast cpu and lots of ram
for outdoor you would be best to install an external access point on the tv pole or similar something like a tp link external access point powered by POE ( power over ethernet ) i dont think netgear have an affordable external access points
the orbi may work but it does a far better job of single story homes than multi story mainly because of its need to use 5 gig backhaul instead of ethernet
pete
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with with what peteytesting says, but the fact is Orbi works very well in my 3-level home. And as I said, I can get good throughput outside, from 500' away from the home, which is phenomenal. I could never do that with my previous WiFi routers. The backhaul has no problem giving good throughput through one level of flooring, which is why I said to put the Orbi "router" on the middle floor.
The reason I didn't think wired APs are necessarily the obvious best solution here is because the OP made it sound like he had a SINGLE ethernet drop on each floor. If he had drops in every room, then yes go with wired APs for sure. However, with only one drop per floor, it may be difficult to get full coverage of the 1,200 SF on each floor, depending on where the drops are.
Just factors to consider.
the connectivity of the sats to the main router depends on what material those floors are made of and thats prob the kicker here , if its all wood it might be fine , if its all concrete it may be impossible to get the backhaul signal to connect
having ethernet on each floor would negate the issue of the concrete and this give a better overall throughput and coverage