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Forum Discussion
Wired home - Orbi vs. Router + ?
(tl;dr, mesh or traditional in a wire house?) Hey all, When I moved into my house, I made sure we ran ethernet to all rooms. It's a 2,400 sq foot home, minus the basement (which is ... 1,200 ...
Multiple wired APs would be the best approach, from a technical perspective, when you have wires to every room already installed. But, you must configure everything properly.
To setup you generally just need to:
1) Put adjacent APs on non-overlapping channels. This applies to both 2.4 and 5G bands.
2) Use 20 Mhz bandwidth and use only channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4G.
3) Use a single SSID.
4) Adjust power levels to reduce overlap between APs. That's usually high on 5G and medium on 2.4G.
You can use Ubiquiti APs without cieling mounting (with some loss of coverage.) I have mine sitting on top of furniture and they work fine for me.
Orbi should be fine also--provided it works for you. But, Orbi gives you almost no configuration options, which is problematic if you encounter interference from neighorbing APs or other sources. You cannot do 1, 2, and 4 above. Orbi aso gives you almost no information to diagnose what's happening.
st_shaw - thanks. While I want to say I'm OK giving up control and stats, I'm not. The Orbi does leave much to be desired in regards to control and ... it just feels flakey. So many little oddities I've experienced within the web app and my confidence is low in the stability of the platform given the past several hours of frustration.
Still, my Asus AC5300 in itself may be problematic. Hard to rule that out as of now; however ... perhaps I should just look at a whole new system using Ubiquiti instead.
Question for you, or anyone. Does PoE carry over a keystone? In that, If I put a PoE switch in my basement (central termination for everything), will the power run through the patch cables that connect to each room's keystone? So If I plug into any of those ports, will I still get power there?
Thanks
Yikes, a full Ubi setup is more expensive than originally thought (Gateway, Switch, 2x AP's, Cloud Key) = $600 (several pieces being warehouse deals too).
adambean wrote:Yikes, a full Ubi setup is more expensive than originally thought (Gateway, Switch, 2x AP's, Cloud Key) = $600 (several pieces being warehouse deals too).
To answer your earlier question, yes POE will transmit through a keystone. I'm doing that now. You just need to make sure all the pairs are connected in the wire.
Regarding the Ubi setup... Strictly speaking, all you need is the APs. Each AP comes with a POE injector. You can download the controller for free and run it on a PC or laptop. It's only needed during setup (unless you use guest networks with access control.) I strongly recommend the key though. You also don't need the Gateway and can use any router you'd like. I don't use the Gateway and I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
st_shaw wrote:
adambean wrote:Yikes, a full Ubi setup is more expensive than originally thought (Gateway, Switch, 2x AP's, Cloud Key) = $600 (several pieces being warehouse deals too).
To answer your earlier question, yes POE will transmit through a keystone. I'm doing that now. You just need to make sure all the pairs are connected in the wire.
Regarding the Ubi setup... Strictly speaking, all you need is the APs. Each AP comes with a POE injector. You can download the controller for free and run it on a PC or laptop. It's only needed during setup (unless you use guest networks with access control.) I strongly recommend the key though. You also don't need the Gateway and can use any router you'd like. I don't use the Gateway and I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
st_shaw I've been exploring Ubiquiti products and was wondering out of curiosity what you're using or what you'd recommended for a router to use with the AP's instead of the security gateway?