How to get the best wi-fi experience working from home

Wi-fi has become a lifeline these days working from home so I thought it might be helpful to share how I managed to greatly improve wi-fi at home. For context, I moved from a small 1 bedroom 2 person apartment to a larger household with many more devices (especially now that we are working from home). At first everything was working well but I noticed some instability in the network. Well, that’s not entirely true, my users found instabilities in the network. Even when they did not know who or what to blame, I knew all along that my router AP was at fault. Instabilities like extreme latency or even disconnecting a client can ruin more than a big game. Getting the best wi-fi experience working from home comes with a little balancing act, luckily wireless access points (WAPs) make things a little easier.
The issues increased with distance from the AP, and although beamforming in my wifi 6 802.11AX router worked amazingly at times, when it didn’t work it was painful for everyone. The new ISP provided 802.11AC router/WAP was not cutting through the dense brickwork. I decided to stick with 802.11AC wireless standard for stability but correct the placement of the AP.
I weighed my options between really expensive routers that could cover the entire space, the designs resemble robotic spiders. I had bargained myself up to shopping for $400+ routers by the time the comparisons were done. It’s hard shopping based on theoretical throughput so I decided to sleep on buying a pokey radio spider for one more night. They are great, don’t get me wrong, I would love one to review. However I am skeptical that they are a simple turnkey one step solution, the answer to the wi-fi arms race in the neighbourhood.

The core principle for designing a WAP layout should be stability. In this case the router was on an extension at the back end of the house which meant old brick exterior walls to penetrate before it got to the original part of the house. There was no overcoming that material reality. The cable demarcation point for the coax cable was more or less fixed there unless I could convince or pay a tech to move it for me. This might be a good solution. In this case it would bring a host of other issues so I had to do something else. Enter the WAP.
Getting the best wi-fi experience working from home doesn’t require getting a router with more antennas. More antennas sticking out of the box will not necessarily result in a better wireless deployment. Also consider the AP below has 3 antennas with 4×4 MIMO.

Wireless Access Points are amazing. You should really consider some of the options available. The best thing about WAPs is you can install them fairly easily with a single cable that delivers power and data over ethernet, or power over ethernet (PoE). PoE changes the entire playing field when you are considering where you can deploy a WAP feasibly. You might run the cable in the wall if you are handy at fishing cables, or tuck it or clip it by the baseboard, for less permanent installations.

Right now the front runners of WAP tech are Engenius and Ubiquiti. The former being the best option at the moment with no data leaks on their recent record. I grabbed a bargain AP again with the Unifi Lite AC Access Point as well as a Unifi 8 Port PoE switch 60w. The AP doesn’t have massive range compared to the rest of the Unifi line but the PoE switch (though it gets hot) is required if you don’t want to run a cable into a inline PoE injector which requires a break in the cable, one for power and one for data. Note about the PoE Swtich: PoE has several standards of increasing power levels: PoE ; PoE+; PoE++; UPoE; and UPoE+. What is essential is that you have a PoE switch for a single cable. You could go with a bigger AP, depending on your situation but the throw of this AP is about 20M across, with the router in the center point so you effectively get 10M of throw in each direction. The signal diminishes as you travel further from the center point. Taking walls, ceilings, wireless density and device to device performance into account is a lot to consider. Getting the best wi-fi experience working from home requires you to be conscious of so many factors, so one really should aim for ideal placement to mitigate any other issues, which might mean using more than one AP for coverage like as with my case. I would suggest starting with one AP since the volume discount 3 packs don’t really offer that much savings unless you have a large place. Also, when buying your AP(s), be aware that Amazon sellers don’t always qualify for warranty service.

With a well placed, centrally located AP, none our devices should be lagging or requesting the router change channels. There are a few other perks like meshing APs if you have more than one as well as a Unifi controller but most households will be happy with a single AP. Alternatively you could ask for mesh devices or wireless extenders from your ISP, they come in various configurations and plug into a wall outlet and extend your network. They usually come at a premium of $5 a piece and with each node getting further from the gateway you get increasing latency. If the expense for renting equipment is claimable on your taxes and removes the up front cost it could be a good option. This comes at a cost of latency unless you wire the nodes. To be honest just by having the two APs in separate rooms only a few meters apart really helped, especially when both APs had meshing turned on. Even with suboptimal vertical placement of one of the APs we still got a big boost in throw and bandwidth on the upper floor which I didn’t really expect. All of use can use the WIFI upstairs without even having the AP installed on that floor yet between a nanoHD and a single AC-Lite.

All you really need to use a WAP with your existing router/WAP combo device is to turn off the wireless access point in your GUI and then plug in and setup your new AP. Cabling can be bought in fixed length or you can make your own. If you know an IT person ask them if they have any extra RJ45 on their spool.