Short of it is that I finally gave up late last year and stopped hard wiring my home network and instead relied on (formerly omada, now unifi) mesh wifi and… it works really well? Like, depressingly well? One AP in my server room and one AP in my office covers everything and while there is definitely a performance loss, I have zero issues streaming (and writing) 4k videos to my NAS and speeds are still way beyond what my ISP will ever give me.

So problem solved? Nah. Because, unfortunately, there is one more spot in my house where I have a dense cluster of devices that are much easier to treat as wired… and it is one floor (and an incredibly tedious exterior wall) away from the server room. Theoretically the Unifi Device Bridge is exactly what I want. Small antenna that I mount on the wall and plug my switch into. Unfortunately, Ubiquiti is a shit company and the UDB only works if the switch is PoE and driven by the UDB itself (actively shuts itself off under any other configuration…). Real surprising and I am sure way more companies than just Ubiquiti sell gigabit PoE network switches designed to be powered by the modem… Good news is the Ubiquiti CSR acknowledged that was bullshit and gave me a massive discount on another AP.

So currently I actually have three APs and it is suboptimal as the bottom two tend to lead to pseudo dead zones for mobile devices where they just seem to bounce between APs so fast they can never connect (haven’t fully debugged).

And I would very much rather not spend another 100-400 USD (that only get better with every tariff…) on a frigging switch when I already have a perfectly adequate one. But also… the place where I most need to be able to quickly look up data on wifi is generally when I am debugging something in the server room that tends to have said dead zones…

So here is hoping this is a class of hardware I just never heard of that doesn’t insist on its own entire ecosystem? Or if there are some generally high bandwidth/low latency wireless radios I can use to connect to the wifi network without being a full AP for meshing purposes? Most of what I can find online is “Well, you could get an old wifi router and turn that into a DMZ maybe?” which… no.

  • Spider Jerusalem@lemmy.mlEnglish
    21·
    2 months ago

    I’ve used APs to mesh (5ghz) two buildings together, with a switch on the far side of the arrangement as a bandaid prior to cabling work. APs and switch in the bridged building were managed, minimal load, worked well enough. I’ve also had good luck with UBBs, though these were always mounted outdoors, and at 1km or less. PoE in both examples. Other parts of the networks in all cases were a mishmash of different vendors.

    I wouldn’t expect the meshed APs to care about what’s on the other side of them, either, but haven’t tried with unmanaged devices/different vendors. I also wouldn’t expect high performance from 5ghz meshing, but depends on several factors. UBBs definitely don’t care what’s behind them.