My new WiFi is argubly worse than my old WiFi, but I think there is a reason.

I recently completed a pretty major [up|cross]grade of my home LAN. There were two main goals. First is to add some additional wireless VLANs so that I can help isolate my growing network of IoT devices and thus protect them and the rest of my devices from them. Second, and this is admittedly not a super important thing, it would also be nice if I didn’t have to connect to a different SSID between the house and workshop.

As detailed elsewhere, that was a journey of discovery, ending with the eventual replacement of two TP-Link APs and two Cisco switches with new Ubiquiti devices. Between the interopterability and easy of configuration, it was a good, though not particularly cheap, move.

Or so I thought.

A week or so later, it appears that I have a lot of connectivity issues. Once I really noticed it and started looking into it, I think I know what’s happening and at least a good bit of the solution, the full spectrum of which of course involves helping someone at Ubiquiti buy another Bentley.

I put the new APs exactly where the old ones were, but the old ones were perhaps a little more sophisticated, RF-wise. The TP-Link APs had an array of four large antennas and, sadly, physics matters. The UniFi APs look like oversized light switches and simply cannot have the same antenna performance. However, the one in the house seemed to work just fine until I had a compelling reason to move it. I wont go into those details, but it had to move from about the center of the house to one side of the house. As I am typing this post, the UniFi controller reports my WiFi experience as “Good”, rather than excellent, along with everything else here on this, the opposite side of the house from the AP.

The real issue comes about when, for reasons I have yet to determine, the experience gets enough worse that the connection is lost and the device, most noticeable to me when it is my laptop, sees the other AP, all the way out in the workshop, but with a marginally ok signal, at least compared to the one it just dropped and it roams to that AP. Now that weak signal results in a substantial slowdown and maybe it drops that connection, too. Then it sees the original AP and connects to it again. This vicious cycle continues.

Once I figured out that this seems to be what is happening, I set the workshop AP to lower power. This makes is a less viable alternative to reconnect to and at least stops the toggling. It does not, however, address the actual problem, which is that the new Ubiquiti APs I chose simply don’t have the coverage that the TP-link devices have.

So, I ordered a couple more APs, ceiling mounts this time. I think I can justify a unit in the hallway between the bedrooms and the livingroom and another in the kitchen. If those two provide dense enough coverage in the house, I can deploy the other wall mount in the workshop, to have two out there as well. If needed, however, I can find a place for a third in the house. One has seemed to be enough for the workshop thus far. Everything WiFi out there is within about 20 feet of the AP.

Update: The power setting on the workshop AP has definitely reduced the number of roaming events in the logs. [facepalm] Now they just disconnect instead. [/facepalm]