WIFI APs and other network stuff
I need to overhaul my home network.
I have a house on a lot that is ~60 meters by ~15 meters. my house is on one side and my garage is on the other, I have a little "studio" building in the middle.
I had relayed the signal around with 4 google/nest wifi mesh things for a decade or so. but I always felt locked out without even a web interface, just the home app. and then two of them died at the same time last month.
I ran some cable last weekend. Now I have 3 roughly equidistant wired switches wired together :House-Studio-Garage.
My current plan is just 3 wireless APs at each. I have a wired only brume 2 that i can use as the router.
I want to be able to have one SSID and roam between them. how well can that work without a mesh type network? just 3 good APs? My phone would stick to one before the mesh network. but that was a long time ago. Im hoping modern protocols might be better?
We have teenage kids, lots of phones and laptops plus wireless home automation devices, shelly switches, wyze cams, smart bulbs, etc.
I'm looking for something open source and as configurable as possible. I'm going in a linuxy direction lately and looking to have more direct access and control of my hardware. That's why I thought to ask here.
Claude and co have recommended:
Zyxel NWA50AXPRO
Cudy AP3000
Omada EAP670
After I pick an AP I also need to pick a switch. I used the old 3 switches I already had on hand: TRENDnet TEG-S82g, Netgear GS105, Netgear FS108. All 3 are unmanaged and one is 10/100. so I want to replace at least the slow one. I'm thinking of getting a managed switch with POE for the switch that connects to the router. I want to try running POE cameras at some point. I want to be able to make a plex server, NAS, etc. Again, I want something flexible and I don't mind fiddling with it or paying a little more for decent hardware. I'm considering the Zyxel GS1900-8HP.
Both the Zyxels apear to be openWRT compatable. which is something I may want to try.
I generally don't keep up with this stuff. I've never went very deep into networking before. I wanted to check with some real people. Has anyone used any of these, or any other good wireless APs? Is there another strategy that would work better for my setup?
Thanks for reading!
Can't speak to the products you've mentioned, but I've been on UniFi/Ubiquiti gear for about 6 years now, and currently have no regrets. I did experience some buggy issues early on, 2021/2022, but I can't remember the last time I had to power cycle the gear or troubleshoot an issue, it's pretty rock solid now in my experience. I particularly like the single pane of glass approach, and that my cameras are all local, I'm not feeding them to Amazon or elsewhere. They've made great strides in the prosumer market, with some great bang for your buck hardware. A lot of good deals can be had on used gear as well, half my homelab I bought used.
I've used Ubiquiti in the past and have no real complaints, other than just not wanting to figure out the options for running the management software anymore. I swapped to Grandstream because of their on-device management interface that still syncs together (one node can act as a master and control the configuration of the other nodes).
I can definitely recommend that general topology as it's what I've been rolling for over a decade at this point.
To give a different opinion on Ubiquiti: their hardware is often good, but their software is not. For APs in particular, they have a horribly designed and overly heavy management software that seems partially intended to sell their cloud and separate-hardware alternatives to running it, when the software should be largely needless in the first place. They've also made questionable choices around longer-term support, for example, deciding to largely abandon support for an entire line of their routers. The remaining Unifi APs I have now have been reflashed to run OpenWrt, and I've been significantly happier with them; I'm still deciding what to do with my EdgeRouter. I'd note that my problem is not that Ubiquiti's software is too complicated; I usually run into problems with it lacking or poorly supporting features I need.
Despite it seeming primarily intended for simpler networks than mine, I've been reasonably happy with OpenWrt; the depth of support it has for esoteric features through packages, the reasonably modern and reasonably standard Linux, and the decently frequent updates make it comparatively easy to work with. It lacks a multi-device management system, but it is simple (perhaps simpler) to manage devices through standard multi-device systems like Ansible. I've found that the Ansible+OpenWrt works quite well with LLM-based management.
Despite my network being perhaps overly complicated (multiple sites, some with multiple internet connections, some with multiple APs, some VLANs that assign BGP-routed IP space, etc), OpenWrt has been able to support everything I've needed (though it doesn't actually deal with BGP for me). The only significant lingering problems I have with OpenWrt at the moment are that babel routing will sometimes mysteriously fail and need to be restarted, and that the upgrade system seems largely designed around the assumption that you'll be physically near the device.
There's also the difficulty in selecting hardware for it: "OpenWrt compatible" can mean anything from the device easily and fully supporting current OpenWrt, to the manufacturer having their own outdated and wonky modified version (eg, Gl.Inet), to installation involving significant hardware challenges.