"Mesh" wifi systems

Tim+ wrote:
Anyone tried the BT system?

https://m.shop.bt.com/learnmore/bt-b...and-services/b
t-whole-home-wi-fi/

Quite a lot of money but we have to have another access point in
our house to get coverage which works, but is a bit of a pain as
devices frequently hang on to the "wrong" hotspot and have to be
manually switched to the strongest signal.

Open to suggestions for better/cheaper solutions.

Probably this is fairly cheap, but equally it's fairly limited.

From what I can see it's essentially a wireless repeater - the signals
travel from one access point to the next. So far as I understand this
arrangement the throughput halves for each access point that the signal
travels through. If your broadband connection is already quite slow
(because of where you are in relation to the exchange) then the
performance for some users might be unacceptably poor.

The professional solution to this is to connect each access point by
wire to the LAN, and have a controller on the LAN which manages the
traffic. That way there is only ever one wireless link between the LAN
and the client device. Clearly this is more expensive to set up, but in
an industrial situation you would already have flood wiring for the LAN,
possibly with PoE support throughout, so siting the access points for
best coverage would not be a problem.

--
Graham J

Anyone tried the BT system?

https://m.shop.bt.com/learnmore/bt-b...and-services/b
t-whole-home-wi-fi/

Quite a lot of money but we have to have another access point in
our house to get coverage which works, but is a bit of a pain as
devices frequently hang on to the "wrong" hotspot and have to be
manually switched to the strongest signal.

Open to suggestions for better/cheaper solutions.

Tim
--

Graham J wrote:
The professional solution to this is to connect each access point by
wire to the LAN, and have a controller on the LAN which manages the
traffic. That way there is only ever one wireless link between the LAN
and the client device. Clearly this is more expensive to set up, but in
an industrial situation you would already have flood wiring for the LAN,
possibly with PoE support throughout, so siting the access points for
best coverage would not be a problem.

Canonical review of this kind of thing:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...wi-fi-gear-is/

(the review has its flaws: I wouldn't select the Ubiquiti APs based on that
review, but use it to understand the approach - not that the UAP-AC range
aren't good APs)

The basic question is: can you string a bit of ethernet to the remote access
point, or is it mandatory to use a wireless repeater?

Typical pro-sumer suppliers for this kind of thing are Mikrotik and
Ubiquiti. I think Ubiquiti needs a separate controller (a Java app you
run somewhere - eg a Raspberry Pi), while Mikrotik provide the controller
internally (like a traditional wireless router), unless you need external
orchestration.

Theo