What I’ve learned from nearly three years of enterprise Wi-Fi at home

There is a moment of perfect stillness after the cable slips through my fingers and vanishes back up the hole in the ceiling like an angry snake. Then the opening stanza of a rich poem of invective leaps from my lips and my wife stares up at me from below, eyes wide, frozen just as I am, ready to catch me if I rage too hard and lose my balance.

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But perched precariously on the top step of an inadequate and shaky ladder in the corner of my living room, drenched in sweat and speckled head to toe in pink insulation and sheetrock dust, body aching with dull red heat, I just can’t maintain the torrent of swearing. I’m too tired. The words die on my lips and I drop my burning arms to my side. Sweat stings my cut hands—"man hands," my wife has always called them, hands that seem to always sport an ever-changing collection of cuts and dry spots and calluses and torn nails as house or computer projects come and go. Tiny drops of blood ooze from shredded cuticles.

Maybe I’ll just stand here for a few hours and not move, I think, mind going blank rather than face the thought of climbing back up into the baking attic and fishing out the cable from underneath mountains of insulation. Maybe I don’t even need Wi-Fi anymore. Maybe I don’t even need computersanymore. Maybe I should throw away everything I own and live in the mountains and grow my own food and never think about technology ever again.

But let’s back up a bit.

In our previous episode...

In mid-2015, I retired my Apple Airport Extreme and upgraded my home’s Wi-Fi with a set of wireless access points from New York-based networking OEM Ubiquiti. I was trying to accomplish two things: first, to eliminate some persistent Wi-Fi dead spots that I just couldn’t reach, even by extending my network with a couple of Airport Expresses (Airports Express?). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I wanted some new homelab gear to tinker with so that I could get some hands-on time with an enterprise grade (or at least "enterprise-lite" grade) Wi-Fi system, because playing with the big toys is fun.

FURTHER READING

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As I explained in our October 2015 review, the Ubiquiti access points delivered on both points. The individual devices weren’t even particularly expensive—strategically placing a few of the APs (the smallest of which can be had for about $80) can be cheaper than buying a single monster consumer-grade AP/router. The monster consumer router can (usually) deliver higher single-client performance in synthetic benchmarks, but the distributed Ubiquiti APs are far better at delivering consistent multi-client performance (and they’re not all bottlenecked behind a single backhaul, either).

Enlarge / A UAP-AC-PRO situated on a shelf in my office.

Lee Hutchinson

More importantly, having multiple access points means that instead of having to take a "make my one base station scream as loud as possible" approach to whole-house coverage, you have the opportunity to fine-tune each individual AP’s 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio strengths and channel selections to create a series of interlocking cells that together offer vastly more consistent coverage—especially in the 5GHz range, which is almost certainly where you want your wireless clients connecting whenever possible.

As it turns out, this kind of network tuning is a lot like sailing: it’s relatively easy to learn the fundamentals in an afternoon, but mastering it probably takes more time than you’re willing to commit unless you just really freaking love sailing. Or screwing around with your Wi-Fi. (Or, alternately, you can get paid to do it at your job.)

A brief word of warning

This feature is not going to be a comprehensive Ubiquiti buyer’s guide. Neither is it going to be a formal review, or an in-depth Wi-Fi tuning guide, or a recommendation on what you should buy—unlike with an all-in-one router/AP, there would be just too many potential configurations to cover.

What you’re about to read is a write-up of my experience with Ubiquiti’s Unifi gear over the past couple of years—what I bought, why I bought it, and what I did with it. I’ll dig into the configuration and implementation choices I made and discuss how well they’ve worked (or didn’t work, in many cases) for me, and then I’ll touch on what I’ve settled on (at least for now).

I will admit that configuration mistakes were made—heaps of them, in fact, though I believe that most have at this point been rectified. At one point I had damn near twice as many APs as I needed, and I overcomplicated things to the point of insanity more than once—the Unifi system is the embodiment of "enough rope to hang yourself with" for a curious home system administrator.