I’m thinking about upgrading my W-Fi and I was curious what wireless access points (WAP) people are using. I’m currently using a Netgear R7800 running OpenWRT.
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Omada APs, various versions. Really happy with them, their WiFi is great and unlike Ubiquity they also work without the controller as independent devices.
2nd hand Ruckus.
They’re decent quality that you’d see in a commercial / enterprise setting (so PoE), but Ruckus also have their “Unleashed” firmware which removes the need for a WLC.
I have 2 in a mesh at home and easily support many IoT devices, phones, laptops, etc on multiple SSIDs
Used 2nd hand sounds great, but the price range online is huge. Which units would you recommend and about how much should I expect to pay for them?
I’m using R600 - these are now EOL, so their price should be more reasonable (ie <60 £/$/€) - up to you if you want / need to pay a little more for someone to have flashed Unleashed onto it.
But definitely check there’s a download of Ruckus Unleashed for the model you want.
Thanks. That’s helpful. I decided to get an R720 I found on Ebay for $60. I’m not sure if it was a good choice but I’m excited to try it out!
That looks like a better choice if you have multiple clients because of the Wave2 and 4x4, so, yes, should be good… Something I might look at in the future. Enjoy.
Ruckus APs with wired backhaul OpnSense box runs the network.
Is Ruckus not crazy expensive? We used it for customers and they are like €500 an access point.
Used on eBay and flashed with the Unleashed firmware. It’s the same price range as Ubiquiti stuff.
Used 2nd hand sounds great, but the price range online is huge. Which units would you recommend and about how much should I expect to pay for them?
I use the Unifi access points. They work well and are fairly inexpensive. The management software can change settings on all of them at once, which is really handy if you have several.
Which ones do you have? Which ones would you get if you were buying now?
If you’re looking for top radio performance, not necessarily the fastest speed, get the Pro models, older gen / second hand if needed, especially if you have suboptimal physical conditions. E.g. concrete walls, metal, etc. I had AC Lite, AC LR and AC Pro in use at some point. All of them were very good but the Pro had the best overall radio performance. If you’re in a wooden house with drywall partitions, probably all would do well enough.
It’s also really annoying if you only have one.
The AP works really well, so I put up with it.
I used to use R7800s. Then switched to UAP AC Pro / U6 Pro. Today just tested the OpenWrt One.
- The R7800 (on OpenWrt) is superb, fast, reliable. Can’t say anything bad about it. One of the most successful wireless platforms I’ve used. Probably the best implementation of this chipset too.
- The UAP AC Pro / U6 Pro perform better than the R7800. They have significantly better radio performance. The range is longer, coverage is uniform, performance is more consistent within the covered area. Adding a local Unifi controller (can be done in Docker) adds some nice wireless and management features like band steering. They don’t work well for bridging / mesh though. I had to run a bridge at some point and a set of Unifi had significant latency spikes, making it bad for gaming and other low-latency applications. A R7800-to-R7800 wireless bridge in the same application was superb with consistently low latency. Unifi can be had for cheaper second hand. Lots of corpos have them and old units get dumped upon upgrades.
- The OpenWrt One, through my very limited testing shows great performance in good radio conditions. Once you put some obstacles for the signal, performance degrades much quicker than Unifi U6 Pro. In a particular test where the Unifi achieved 50Mbps, the OpenWrt One did 1.5Mbps. I haven’t compared it to an R7800. I don’t know if it would perform any better with different antennas.
Before that I’ve used R7000, WZR-300HP, WL-500g, WRT54G/L, among others, but none of these are relevant today. :D
Unifi has amazing radio performance, but the software is yucky. and they “recently” (last year?) had a backwards-incompatible update of the controller software which I still didn’t get to migrate.
