My double routers both wifi and public facing are not active at the same time
I can swap them with tplink wifi switches on my alternate att access pt network. I have used them a couple of times when the house Was empty.
Once i was mucking with the main public firewall and my connection went down while reloading and it did not load correctly. Luckily i switched to the backup. My Main wifi router failed when i didn't have a backup live. I had one in closet configured and ready to go and had to have the neighbor swap it out for me. Now i am ready.
But ya back to main question... wired is always more reliable in my opinion. That is why i use an existing cable run we have at multiple points that was for now defunct direct tv for connections with gocoax moca boxes for wired backhaul and other stuff.
I had a Linksys Velop system and had all sorts of issues with it. It was really, in my experience, crap. And the company did a horrible job of supporting it.
At work we have about 10,000 users mostly working remotely. Most of the time when someone complains “my PC is slow” or even worse “my VDI is slow” it’s a last mile issue. We also see a lot of Teams and Zoom issues are actually home network problems. Which is tough too because how far do you really go diagnosing and fixing someone’s home network problem before you give up and say “maybe you need to be working in the office.”
I remember that time. I probably bought one of the first consumer routers on the market in the late 90's. I had to immediately buy a second one because a friend immediately asked if he could keep it after I brought it over for a lan gaming session as his place. I also probably bought one of the first wireless routers. I remember having a talk with my ISP back in the late 90's about what to do for security because at the time they litterly put my computer right on the internet with a public ip.
The wifi revolution didn't start vendors bolting on wifi to their routers. The fact it was happeing was a key part of why the wifi revolution happened.
The standards were actually pretty reasonable evolution. 802.11b first then 802.11 G&A, then 802.11N, next was 802.11AC, and now 802.11 AX. There may have been one or two more that I missed, but that is the majority of them over the last 2 decades. The problem with wifi is that all of the bandwith numbers are theoretical based on perfect lab conditions. Consumers as consumers do always want more or the best, or the highest. I blame the crazy marketing folks for twisting anything they can to try to sell more instead of being up front with consumers.
As kind of stated above I really don't think the ISP's did anything to solve anything to do with Wifi as those standards were already in place. They were just looking for a way to make more profit. One of them was to encourage a $10 a month upcharge by giving their wifi router device a bit more usability to the consumer by managing it for them.
And having this multilayer approach isn't going to fix poorly configured routers, I think if anything it would make it worse.
I have actually worked for a large ISP for the last 20 years. I have been part of the test groups for various ISP supplied routers and for their router management service. Though there are certainly limitations and drawbacks to their devices being consumer friendly hasn't been one of them. The most common issue is reception over anything else from my experience. There is also some equipment that has been better then others in general.
Yea, but there are several factors there that you can't just say it is their home router. I was helping my brother in law trying to troubleshoot a problem his GF was having with her work. They kept pointing the finger at her saying it was her problem. He also works for a telco so as we dug into it from a few directions what we found was that it was her work demanding every bit of bandwith she had. I am not talking about a little bit either. They were literally capturing her screen constantly among some other things and needing multiple 10's of Mbps per second. Ultimately the solution was spending twice as much for internet so he could get more upload bandwidth, but that was far from a user network problem, and really all about the crazy monitoring they were implementing on her computer because she was remote.
Perhaps I was lucky in my choice of gear as I do believe there is allot of cheap horrible crap out there that hardly works when it comes to wifi routers. They are the bottom of the barrel gear though.
I don't know what to say about Linksys Velop. I have heard read mixed things on it. But as far as mesh systems going you can't beat the ease of use of Google Wifi or their newer products. It just works from my experience. Not allot for you to configure/manage though so if that is what you want you should avoid it.
Oh absolutely. That’s why I say “last mile.” And to your point a “network problem” isn’t all that likely to be a hardware failure. It’s usually a combination of things and almost never a hardware issue. Most of the time it’s just crappy wifi coverage or an ISP issue resulting in packet loss, latency, and jitter.
The remote monitoring thing really doesn’t help either
@sburke781 sorry for taking things off topic for what you are looking for.
The problem is routers are edge devices so how would you redirect traffic between them. If you had two with identical configurations. Then had HE monitor the Gateway IP you could potentially powercycle zwave/Zigbee outlets between them when the gateway is no longer responding for a time.
I have to believe openSense/PFSense has some way to create redundant configurations. It would likely require some kind of secondary network connectivity between the devices so they wouldn't be independent of each other. They would just move the gateway ip between devices when the other device goes offline. Is the goal to protect against a router failure though or also your ISP being down for some reason?
What does that mean...? TBH I have dipped in and out of this since setting it up, spending most of today in the nice Spring weather, so happy to see people to get what they can out of what I have created :-).
I genuinely appreciate the thought, and something I would like to see others consider when responding in general, so thankyou. I should probably be more on topic, but mostly happy to let people find their own happy medium...
This two items reflect why I went the route I did (Omada SDN). I work at a high school where there is somewhere around 40 access points. A student, or staff, who connects to their respective SSID gets fantastic wifi coverage throughout the school. I can start a video chat and move around the building and everything just works as my wifi is being passed from AP to AP. This is true for 1000+ simulteaneous users in the building at any given time.
So I cornered the network adminstrator for my school (I think he takes care of 15-20 of the schools in my school division) and talked with him about my problems at home. He immediately suggested either Ubiquiti or Omada and to stay away from anything Mesh. He stated he would never implement any mesh networking in the schools he takes care of (all AP's are wired backhaul). He then showed me some of the features and additional control I would be gaining, while having the same type of wifi performance I see in my school. It sounded great, and I was scared to hear the pricetag. When I found out I can accomplish all of this (new router, 16 port switch, 3 AP, and a controller for under 500 bucks, I never looked back. Hard to believe you can have commercial grade performance, features and control for this price.
For the square feet, a school is an extremely wifi dense environment. Most classrooms in my school have a class set of chromebooks for student use. Plus the school has BYOD, so almost everyone's phone connects to the school wifi once they enter. Just in my classroom alone, if I have the students on the chromebooks, I probably have close to 50 wifi devices connected just in my 1 classroom (25 chromebooks and a lot of phones). Now multiply that by the whole building. It is impressive how everything just always works! I don't think our network adminstrator gets enough thanks, LOL.
Just to be clear, more than happy for people to take this topic where they feel is useful.... As I mentioned, can understand and appreciate the consideration of keeping on topic, but am happy to let that wander as needed.
Just to take it off track even more did anyone get their WIFI 7 router yet I am not investing in any updates since I just got 500 AP's updated to WIFI 6.
Mesh networking and wired backhaul are not mutually exclusive. That is largely consumer Marketing BS that has made it sound like at times they are. If he has multiple switches using redundant paths that is a kind of mesh network. If the AP's he is using in the school are aware of each other and coordinating handoff between ap's that is a kind of mesh networking as well.
It may not be mesh networking in the consumer marketing BS sense of wireless backhaul but it is a mesh network. As said further up in this thread Wired backhaul is your friend and really anything that can be wired is better then not.
My school's network administrator and his fellow network administrators would disagree. But I live in Canada, maybe the terms are used differently in Canadian industry vs American.
What you do is also have your network switches and routers be able to be power toggled like with kasa switches or other on an alternate wifi network Ie 4g etc. Turn off main router via switch, turn on alternate router via switch. They should be configured identically with ips, ip reservations, ssids etc. Now toggle your network switches. Everything should come back up as normal.
A mesh network is a local area networktopology in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data to and from clients.
I am not talking about what Mesh means to consumers trying to buy a router. But what has existed for decades as part of networking principals. He can disagree but mesh networks have been around allot longer then Netgear Orbi or Google Wifi. Large organizations have been using them for decades. I also guarantee you he is running a mesh network topology in the school.
For.me the biggest wifi issues i have in my multiple properties is channel congestion
One way i've worked around it is using newer ax wifi 6 for devices that can support it or even ax over wifi 5 using the newer dfs ie 56-64 channels. Of course its only a short term solution till those also become congested.
My network adminstrators definition would be the same definition used by the companies that are supplying the commerical (not consumer) grade networking equipment. Here is an example of what TP-LInk has to say about Mesh with their business/commerical equipment:
This is not to say that every major supplier of networking equipment will have the same definition. But the techs are using the lingo and definition that has been widely adopted by their industry by both the network administrators and their suppliers.
I can also guarantee he would disagree with this statement. He would agree with what wikipedia has to say on this issue, (although you can not always trust wikipedia).
Nope, he would definitely disagree with this as well. And simply state that they are implementing the 802.11v protocol and the 802.11k protocol, which both make no mention of Mesh.
I imagine he would agree with what wikipedia states in regards to what the 802.11 standard has to say about Mesh Networking. (as opposed to the more General definition of Mesh Networking that would apply to a lot more things than just wifi, think zigbee, zwave, etc...) Mesh networking as it relates to the 802.11 standard has the "key aspect of the presence of multi-hop wireless links" (as referenced in the wikipedia link above).
In my school, I do not believe we have a single multi-hop wireless link, so by the wikipedia definition that defines 802.11 Mesh Networking (linked above) we do not have a mesh network.
TBH I have dipped in and out of this since setting it up, spending most of today in the nice Spring weather, so happy to see people to get what they can out of what I have created :-).
I am not investing in any updates since I just got 500 AP's updated to WIFI 6.
