I’m looking to provide decent WiFi coverage through my entire house and the garden, I have 3 floors to cover. Currently I have the balance one on the ground floor near the front of the house at floor level surrounded by brick on all but one side. I know this is not an ideal location but I’m unable to move the unit due to the location of the internet feeds. I also have a draytek AP-800 again located on the ground floor, this one is ceiling mounted and is in the middle of the house. I currently have these 2 units set to have different SSID’s.
My current weak WiFi spots are in the garden at the back of the house and on the top floor. The garden is the worst with frequent signal drop out making it unusable, the top is better and just has slow speed. I’m looking for advice on the following:
What would be the best access point locations to give full coverage? Taking into account I can not move the balance one, I am able to locate AP’s on the ground floor at the front of the house high up, in the middle of the house at any height. One the 1st floor only at the front of the house low down and on the top floor in any position.
What I’d like is seamless switching between AP’s to get the best signal without having to reconfigure devices when moving around. Is this possible with a) a mixture of draytek and peplink AP’s or b) only with peplink only AP’s?
If I need to buy additional AP’s which peplink would be best, I have looked at the AP one, one mini and one 300 but can’t see how the different configurations would affect my setup.
How do I actually configure the access points to work as one seamless WiFi network?
As far as transmit power goes the AP One should suffice your needs as it does have 400mw of transmit power when set to max and can reach up to 2W with power boost enabled (may exceed regulatory limits)
2/4. You can certainly accomplish this by setting the same SSID on each AP with same encryption key (if any). Keeping in mind it is up to the client device for deciding when it needs to roam, detect, evaluate, and roam to another AP.
Depending on the capabilities of your client devices. The AP One provides the strongest transmit power but runs only on the 2.4Gmhz range where as the AP One Mini/AP One 300M are able to 2.4Mhz or 5Mhz (software selectable) and have a transmit power of 50Mhz. Also, what are the speeds of your current internet connections?
Thanks for the reply. My combined internet speed is 220Mb download and 30Mb upload. It’s not essential to have very high speed on wireless as anything requiring full internet speed ins wired. I’d just like to be able to have a decent speed for regular internet browsing, youtube would be the most demanding i should think. Most of all I’d like the connection to be stable throughout the entire house and garden. Are you saying this would be possible with a single peplink AP?
Depending on the size/obstacles of the house the AP One should certainly fit your needs. For faster internet speeds via wireless the AP One 300M would be the best fit otherwise if more focused for signal strength the AP One would work.
The Draytek AP-800 does 18dbm which equals about 63mw of power. If replaced with a AP One (26dbm) it would provide 400mw of transmit power. Essentially it is about 6x stronger as far as transmitting a signal.