Large Home - WiFi Solutions for 2021

[daepp]

For 2021 I am bound and determined to fix some of the remaining dead zones (read: frustrations) at the home we bought two years ago.

Lots of details below, but BLUF I need to enhance my WAP system both to eliminate some dead zones, and make it (FINALLY!) possible to stop dropping cell phone calls when arriving home. That may seem lame, but both my wife an I use the evening drive home to return business calls, so it happens a LOT. If anyone in the PPOT Brain Trust is experienced in these things, I'd sure appreciate your help with my 2021 Resolution to fix this once and for all!

[daepp]

Details:

We live in a suburb or Los Angeles but in a notoriously weak cell signal area - regardless of cell provider. Claremont is the kind of place that prides itself on no drive thru restaurants, and as I've never seen a cell tower here (and I know about all the disguises) I suspect they have made them difficult to add. So for all intents and purposes we cannot talk on our cell phones at home without help.

We get the Internet via a 400gb cable router. We immediately added a device we bought from Verizon that (I think) acts as a mini-cell site. It connects to my router (via a switch) but hasn't been a whole lot of help. I suspect it would work ok indoors, but the house has 14" walls, a large footprint and over an acre of grounds, so I don't think it's been much help.

So next we added 3 Wireless Access Points (2 Engenius devices mounted under the floors and 1 outdoor Engenius WAP). The are all wired back to the switch with POE Ethernet cables. So it's a wired "mesh" system, and it works seamlessly and well - but it doesn't have sufficient coverage. And since the bulk of our phone calls are made via WiFi calling, we have many no-go-zones when using our phones. Not good.

The areas I need to address are the dead Wifi zones outside in the front, side and rear yard areas, and the 400' +- from our driveway to our home where we'd like to hang on to cellular longer.

Driveway Cellular - hardest one first: We can speak on our cell phones up until we make a 90 deg turn and begin down our driveway. We have excellent line-of site to the 3rd floor attic of our home, and the area is fairly narrow. I was originally looking for WAP with a long narrow range (more on that later), but sometimes in transitioning from cellular to wifi calling there is a lag or dropped call, perhaps a micro-cell site would be better? Is there even such a thing made?

WiFi Dead Zones outisde: one of these areas is large/wider in size, and two others are fairly small. In looking at WAP's etc I cannot tell what their coverage "patterns?" are. I have a very limited understanding of RF and antennas etc, so perhaps if I knew what to look for that would help.

Hopefully I can post some pics or diagrams to give a better picture of the problem.

[daepp]

In the pic above, you can see the front of the house, and the red arrow points towards a
400' long drive (not in pic) out to the main street. It's turning from the street to our driveway where we loose cell phone calls.


In this pic you can see an attic vent near the peak of the roof. I have run an ethernet cable to this vent, as well as to the one at the same spot on the opposite (rear) of the house. My thought was that these elevated locations would be good for coverage.

I hope that helps!

[id10t]

WiFi deadzones are easy to handle, you've already done some of it - just add more APs to your existing system. Inside and/or out. Helps to have a graphical signal strength monitor of some type so you can determine best placement. Depending on how full scale you want to go run a trench down the side of the drive and add an AP in the middle. You could maybe even go solar and just run fiber. After that, it would just be the transition from cell to wireless.

And yes, they do make pico cells that will provide a cell signal backed by your network connection. Unfortunately, I don't know if there is any way to lock them down to just "a few" phones (unless you want to be nice and supply neighbors with service....)

[rfaust6024]

WOW, What an ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL HOME you have...
Bob F.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by rfaust6024

WOW, What an ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL HOME you have...
Bob F.

You should see his patio.

Sorry, no help on the dead zones but we have the same problem in a much smaller footprint. We are with Sprint (I guess now T-Mobile).

[daepp]

Originally Posted by id10t

WiFi deadzones are easy to handle, you've already done some of it - just add more APs to your existing system. Inside and/or out. Helps to have a graphical signal strength monitor of some type so you can determine best placement. Depending on how full scale you want to go run a trench down the side of the drive and add an AP in the middle. You could maybe even go solar and just run fiber. After that, it would just be the transition from cell to wireless.

And yes, they do make pico cells that will provide a cell signal backed by your network connection. Unfortunately, I don't know if there is any way to lock them down to just "a few" phones (unless you want to be nice and supply neighbors with service....)

Some kind of signal strength monitor would help for sure - are these available for DIY folks?

Googling pico cell now.

[daepp]

I searched for a pico cell and have posted one of the results below. I think it includes an outdoor antenna, but they refer to it as omni (so I'm guessing it's omni-directional). I think I need one that's fairly linear (uni-directional) to fix my driveway problem? Also, what specs will show how far and how wide the pattern is on a device?

Ps - thanks Milt!

https://www.signalbooster.com/products/surecall-fusion4home-3g-4g-home-building-signal-booster

[id10t]

There is an Android app I've used - WiFi Analyzer. Don't have anything android anymore so I can't say for sure what is still out there...

What you are looking for is something that will show all the APs it can see, what channels they are on, and signal strength...

[wildthing]

I have looked into, and almost purchased, the Orbi RBK852 / AX6000. It was between that and the newly released eero Pro. Since it's tri-band, you can have WiFi backhaul for areas where cabling is an issue...

But no, I have a smaller home, so YMMV...

[944 S2]

Nest Wifi? Worked for me. Covered at least 3800sq/ft with two hubs.

[jyl]

I am thinking you should contact a networking guy to come install business level gear - treat it like a mini school campus that you want to blanket with Cisco Aironet or Ubiquity or other enterprise APs. Including the driveway and as far down the street as you can get with an AP at the corner of your property. The hope would be that as you drive toward your house, your phone grabs the WiFi before the cellular drops.

Deduct as home office expense, perhaps.

Oh, also, have you looked into installing cell signal boosters in your cars? I don’t know if they work, but they are out there.

[beepbeep]

Hi,

Yes, this is the size of office building so you need to treat it as such (mobility-wise) despite bandwidth requirements being lower.

I had similar problem (smaller house though) and solved it by deploying multiple 802.11ac access points (5GHz only) with PoE and careful channel planning and 802.11r roaming enabled (this allows you to roam from AP to AP without dropped calls).

If you are IT savvy, you can build it yourselves for fraction of price (I did), otherwise let somebody build it for you.

Couple of hints:
- 2.4GHz is not used in such installations. It is slow, interfercence prone, there are too few channels and it is generally a mess. 5GHz is way to go. Disable legacy rates too.
- Use same model of APs everywhere. Theoretically they are mixable but 802.11r roaming is hard to get working between different models.
- Careful channel planning is a must. Adjacent APs should never use same channels. Keep Channel width to 20MHz (should net you at least 15MB/s (Megabytes, not Megabits. Capital M).
- Sometimes, less power works better. I had to dial down power to 100mW. Too much power makes devices to "not let go" when moving. You want to roam as you go.
- Use same SSID and pw across the network, or roaming will not work.


P.S.
I have built all of this with PoE switch, a load of second hand TP-Link Archer C7 v2 routers bought cheaply, reconfigured as AP's (using OpenWRT) and fed via PoE ejectors. 300Mbi/sec all over the place, zero issues. I have also heard good thing about Ubiquity , if you do not have knowledge.

[OldSpool87]

Originally Posted by wildthing

I have looked into, and almost purchased, the Orbi RBK852 / AX6000. It was between that and the newly released eero Pro. Since it's tri-band, you can have WiFi backhaul for areas where cabling is an issue...

But no, I have a smaller home, so YMMV...

For WiFi I used the Orbi. We have a home built in 1910 with plaster and metal lath walls (terrible for signals). The Orbi is expensive but worked. We had cellular coverage issues as well. Our area in general is a little spotty. We got a cell extender from Verizon which works.

[1990C4S]

Have you looked at the google mesh networks? It solved all of my issues.

[cstreit]

Mesh WiFi is absolutely the way to go. Just distribute access points. No dead zones, not network switching.

I’m not sure you can fix outdoor cell reception. For indoor you can use WiFi calling or look into “microcells” which act like mini cell towers connected to your network.

[stealthn]

You said cellular and wifi, which one is poor?

You will need to run PoE or an injector over Ethernet (under 100 M)

Have a look at Meraki or Ubiquity

[HardDrive]

Cell service is something to take up with your provider.

Lots of options with for wifi. For our daily work, we no longer use wifi. Power line adaptors that go directly into the router. No wifi involved. Works for us.

[beepbeep]

FYI, no network engineer would ever use mesh professionally. It is a purely a consumer solution that gives illusion that "everything works" as coverage improves.

Basically, user sees more bars in the phone and as long as Facebook and Youtube loads and there are no cables he is happy.

For few users this is acceptable but bandwidth gets lower as mesh network is forced to do more hops. Some products have dedicated backhaul channels, some do not.

But you will never find any mesh or 2.4GHz in pro setting. It is all cabled, channel-planned and supports multiple users running full tilt.

[GH85Carrera]

For my house all the devices that are "fixed in place" like TVs and DVRs are on Cat5E and no wifi needed. It was a royal pain to run the Cat 5E out to the corners of the house to run the video cameras for the DVR system. By I don't have to replace batteries and they simply work.

For the mobile devices, we have good coverage all the way to the garage but our house is much more "square" than yours. My router is up on top of a shelf 7 feet in the air, in one corner of the house. My work bay in my garage is as far away as possible, and it plays Pandora on an old iPad just fine.

Good luck with whatever setup you go with. It will not be cheap if it works, but quality never is.