You want your transmit power set as low as it’s possible to get and still cover the area you want, and no higher than that. Having a too-strong AP can lead to a situation where a distant client locks onto that AP because it’s receiving a strong signal, but it doesn’t have the power to transmit back to the AP. The transmit-power “auto” selection is misleading-it simply locks the AP’s radio at its highest power setting, which is almost certainly not what you want. Advertisementīefore we begin, though, let’s talk about “auto.” Unifi APs do indeed have an “auto” setting for both power and channel selection, and you should never use either of them. The idea is to ensure that your APs are each using separate channels with low noise and low interference the traditional 2.4GHz advice of “always use channel 1, 6, or 11” fits in with this strategy.
Configuration tweaks for whole-house 5GHz satisfactionįrom a perspective of strategy, you start by making gross adjustments to your WLAN by tweaking your access points’ channel selections, channel widths, and transmit power. There’s no magic bullet-but there are some helpful knobs to twiddle. I’m happy with how things have shaken out, but getting to that state can take a bit of effort, and the specific things that worked for me might not work for you. This is a blatant reminder that while automated predictive tools can help with your planning, there’s just no substitute for a good ol’ site survey.Īgain, the biggest thing I was trying to achieve was having a uniform, strong 5GHz signal everywhere-something that requires multiple APs to do well (unless you live in a studio apartment and have only one room). The most interesting thing about the above coverage heat-maps-which were generated using a copy of NetSpot Pro, courtesy of the NetSpot folks-is how dramatically they differ from the Unifi controller’s predictive map (included in the gallery for comparison). Devices roam from AP to AP as needed without dropping off the WLAN everything just works, which is exactly how you want Wi-Fi to be. Unifi APs err on the side of providing consistent and reliable connections for lots of devices rather than allowing single clients to dominate, which is typically what you want even in a family home. If you’re looking to buy Unifi APs so you can dominate benchmarks, you’re buying the wrong gear-go buy one of these crazy-ass things and call it a day.Īnecdotally-and, in my opinion, far more usefully-I’ve had absolutely no problem with wireless coverage or speeds, even with a dozen house guests all simultaneously streaming video and playing games. Single-client bandwidth isn’t where these devices excel-as noted in the previous review, a years-old Apple Airport Extreme beats a Unifi AC-Pro in a multi-stream iPerf test without breaking a sweat. I’ve elected not to include detailed iPerf-based client bandwidth testing in this review-if you want that, you can hit the previous review because the numbers won’t have changed all that much.
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