Home WiFi Planning

[NETWizz]

My neighborhood is flooding me with 124 SSIDs!

I am going to upgrade my Wireless Access Point WiFi 5 with WiFi 6e units, and I am going to run all 6 Ghz because I have none of that!

I did a wireless survey with the Ekahau Sidekick 2 and as expected, I am dropping some packets in my garage:





My house starts having problems around -65 dBm



Here is the Key/Ledged:



This is my second floor... The AP is actually in the upper right, that's where Ekahau thinks it is located (it's off by about 3'):



Dell laptops struggle at -55 dBm sometimes it seems!

This is the best planning First floor:

This is the best planning Second Floor:

This is what I am going to build First Floor:

Second floor what I will build Second Floor:

 

[thecomputerguy]

This is way more effort than I'd ever put in.

 

[timeshifter]

I'd love to do more mapping of WiFi and other things like you've done. My biggest roadblock is floorplans. Don't have one for my residence or any others I might work with. Too much work to measure walls and draw them up. Wish there was a good app or AI system that could draw these up on the fly. I know that Apple put out a new API called Room Plan for iOS developers last year that looked promising but I scoured all the apps out there recently and came up short.

Would think there should be an AI that can take a Google Earth pic of your house and spit out a rough floor plan.

Without that I shy away from these projects.

 

[NETWizz]

Oh that’s easy. By law there MUST be a fire escape plan. It also must be posted for any business, so I use that when I cannot get something better.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'd love to do more mapping of WiFi and other things like you've done. My biggest roadblock is floorplans. Don't have one for my residence or any others I might work with. Too much work to measure walls and draw them up.

Lots of tools out there which make it fairly easy. Some more complex than others (like..some allow you to put in physical aspects such as type of walls (material), thickness of walls, etc). In the real world, there's furniture too (picture big wall units). Also in the real world, us IT people usually so surveys of larger setups such as schools...after hours...but when the classroom is filled with bodies...what a huge difference, the bodies are like wave absorbing sponges!

Ultimately, survey and designer programs are more like a basic guide....I'll say to get you 50% there. The other 50%....is up to the person doing the survey and install. You gotta factor in a TON of variables. So many other factors to figure out. Just a few of those factors...
*Are wireless clients moving around the area? A wireless client moving away from the nearest AP...clinging on to that signal and getting weaker at say, -70dBm, will negatively impact the performance for other wireless clients right in range of that APs cell with a good -38dBm signal. A feature called "airtime"...the users with a good signal still have to wait for the AP to talk to each wireless client "one at a time" until their turn again. Yes..more modern radios with MU-MIMO has lessened that to some degree...but not 100%. This is why I can't stand designing a wireless network thinking about "max range" and "how few APs can I use?" I prefer more APs and lower TX power.
*What are the wireless clients doing for traffic?
*Do you have any wireless devices with heavier use? Such as...HD smart TVs? A smart TV streaming Netflix at high rez may not be happy with a -53dBm signal, but a casual laptop user streaming YouTube on their laptop may be just fine.
*When moving around, study signals, where each APs "cell of coverage" should end and the next one picks up. You don't want cells to overlap much, factor in RSSI as you plan.

BTW, Ubiquiti has a REALLY cool feature they released a couple of years ago for their WiFiMan smart phone app, works with certain Unifi gateway models of theirs. You walk around with the app and it uses your phones hardware to "draw the floor plan and heat map" as you walk around with your phone.