Outside WiFi

Whilst we have excellent WiFi in the house, due to three access points, the garden was not as well covered. A brick wall and conservatory in the way, etc. The WiFi was OK in the garden but I thought I should really try out an actual proper outdoor WiFi access point.

I now have one of these, an Aruba AP-375, and yes, they do cost over £1,000, which is silly, I agree. But it works with the WiFi we have (all one controller), and is clearly robust and weather proof.

We now have excellent WiFi in our garden, and the gardens of several neighbours!

The garden really is not big enough to justify the cost, and if it was not more of an experiment to see how well it works, I doubt I would have got it.

As with the others it is run of PoE, so a simple network cable in to the loft to a PoE switch. I got proper external grade cat5e cable - from Amazon (here).

With solid core network cable you have to get the right plugs that work with solid cable. I actually got some cat6 plugs for solid cable from Amazon (here) which "just work".

I had to also order the wall bracket. Do not be fooled by pictures in the Internet, there is an "H" and "V" version for the surface on to which it is mounted being horizontal or vertical. There are sites selling one with a picture of the other! I fitted with some wall anchors, which, you guessed it, I got from Amazon (here) and drill bit (here).

I walked around the block, and even found a spot on the main road where our WiFi is just visible (through a few houses /gardens). It goes quite a way in open air from high up.

Walking around, it is amazing how many WiFi signals you see. It was nice to see, amongst the VM and BT names, at least one aa.net.uk signal from someone in the next street :-)

Obviously, where these access points make more sense is when you do have a large open space, not just a simple residential garden like mine. We have done WiFi at a beer festival a few times, and if we do that again I can see us putting a few of these in.

Decent WiFi

The Aruba AP-515 "WiFi-6" Access Point

My home needs more than one WiFi access point. This is partly because it is a 5 bed house, and partly because the garage conversion for my office involved a lot of Celotex (metal foil coated insulation) in the walls and ceiling, which kind of stops WiFi signals dead. It would be just about possible to cover the whole house with one access point in the ceiling at the top of the stairs (as my neighbour does) but that would not get to my garage. So we actually have three access points.

Getting good WiFi at home

If you have a large home, or one with thick or insulated walls, you may need more than one access point to get good WiFi coverage. BT are making a point of this in recent adverts, but please do think carefully about this. WiFi is simply part of your home or office network infrastructure and a totally separate thing to your Internet Connection. Yes, smaller homes often have one box for all (modem, router and WiFi), and that does work for smaller homes. But if you want good networking at home or office, I'd recommend thinking about your network infrastructure (WiFi, Cabling, and switches) as a separate project than your choice of ISP. Good networking at home can make all the difference. WiFi repeaters and power ethernet devices are generally no match for running a network cable to where you need an access point. With PoE (power over Ethernet) that can be one cable and no need to find a power socket near where the AP is located (important when on the ceiling). Any fixed machines on desks, or TVs, etc, are often better handled on cable as well, and there are some nice PoE powered 5 port switches that are available making it easy to run one cable to behind the TV for several devices and not need another power socket.

Please, don't do what I saw in one place. We spent a weekend at a large holiday home. WiFi did not reach from one end to the other. They had installed two totally separate ISP connections each with a separate WiFi modem/router with the default ISP set SSID and password, in order to "cover" the whole house!

Ubiquiti/Unifi

Ubiquiti have been pretty groundbreaking in making a lot of network equipment available at a reasonable price, including good WiFi access points. I tried these and we were selling them at A&A. I am using Ubiquiti IP Cameras and they are pretty good (just got some of the G3 Pro models which do proper PoE, and they are nice).

I tried these access points at home, and I did run in to a real problem with iPhones, roaming between access points, and IPv6. At one point we thought FireBricks may be a factor, but it seems that is just because A&A sold Ubiquti APs, FireBrick routers and IPv6 networking - the problem was seen with non FireBrick routers. The problem looks like it is probably iPhone related, but hard to say if iPhone bug or not. The big clue was when someone found that turning off IGMP snooping on the AP solved the issue. This makes some sense as IPv6 uses multicast for neighbour discovery, so broken IGMP and multicast could break IPv6. What is interesting is we have also seen this on another make of AP now, though still iPhone specific, and it looks like it relates to 802.11r roaming. My guess is an iPhone bug.

Aruba

I changed to Aruba access points. They are a bit more pricey than Ubiquiti - around twice the price. Ubiquiti really have done a good job on price.

They have a confusing array of model numbers which fooled me a bit. Not only for different grades of WiFi standard and speed, and number of radios, but for indoor and outdoor, and for internal and external antenna. They have models for specific countries - the one we need is "RW" (which I assume means Rest of World).

Like most systems to manage a set of access points you need a controller. Ubiquiti do controller software for multiple platforms for free. What Aruba were doing is a separate hardware controller, but they then added Aruba Instant which is where one of the APs acts as a controller for the set, providing a nice web interface. This has the advantage of no separate controller, but also, if that AP is off line another takes its place with the same config, so redundancy built in. What was confusing is that this was a separate model - the IAP-305 is the one that can be a controller and the AP-305 cannot. What fooled me further is that later models are all able to be a controller but don't have the I in the name, so an AP-375 is an outdoor AP and there is no IAP-375 which confused me. The AP-375 can be stand-alone / controller. I'll be trying an outdoor AP (AP-375) soon, to ensure good coverage of the garden for the summer, and I'll no doubt post more on that.

As for roaming iPhones and IPv6, the Aruba has control of separate roaming related settings for 802.11r, 802.11k, and 802.11v. It seems only the 802.11r breaks iPhones and IPv6, but roaming is pretty seamless with the other two settings turned on. I am sure one day this will be fixed in iPhones and so 802.11r can be enabled.

Update: It seems 802.11r is OK now, but also enable the setting to make ARP unicast (broadcast filtering).

Personally I like the Aruba better, but that does come at a price.

WiFi-6

One of the interesting things for both manufacturers is the new 802.11ax standard (aka WiFi-6). I don't have a device that can use it yet, but it is rumoured that iPhones may have this year. Aruba have an AP that does it (AP-515). Once they are both available, I'll give them a try and keep you posted.