Frankly I wonder at how big some of these peoples' houses are. My single seven year old Nighthawk router covers an entire 2300 square foot home and penetrates the brick walls to reach halfway up the street.
That’s not my experience, all the way from Meraki enterprise access points to the standard consumer WRT54GL.
First problem is 5GHz is terrible at going through walls, I don’t believe it will even go through a single brick wall and maintain decent bandwidth. Even 2.4GHz is considerably slowed by 2 or 3 drywall/plywood obstructions.
Second problem is can the mobile device you’re using return that signal through all those walls to the access point. I have noticed an huge increase in quality and snappiness of FaceTime and other high up and down bandwidth activities once I added more access points so that connections are going through only 2 or 3 walls.
For another reference, I have a hotel that needed to upgrade its network to meet the brand standards for signal strength in all the rooms, and we had to end up installing 6 access points in the drop ceiling of each hallway 15 guest rooms in length (each guest room is ~15ft wide, so the corridor was ~225ft long). It resulted in the elimination of almost all guest complaints about the wireless network.
Mine's only slightly larger than that (mostly by virtue of having 3.5 levels, not by X-Y size), but the original plaster walls attenuate the hell out of 5GHz signals. I have two APs, one in the basement and one on the second floor and even with that, I'm considering adding two more inside and a dedicated one outside to serve the patio/BBQ area as I can readily tell the speed difference to internal file and backup servers if I'm in the same room as an AP vs on another floor or outside.
Make no mistake, it still "works" with just one, only slower.
Somehow I have managed to spend most my time in a house that has concrete and brick stopping 5G, a house with wooden walls that block RF and foil insulation under the floor which is even worse, and a workplace environment that has literal faraday cages all around.
I like UniFi in wall access points in the room I’m inside.
My house is about that size. My detached garage is 400sqft. My barn is 1600 sqft. And my travel trailer is 37" long. My network comes into the house and the wireless needs to cover all of the structures because we need into in all the places. It's all spread over about an acre and a half. I run ethernet to a PoE AP in the garage, through an overhead crawl space that covers thale span between the house and the garage, I have b2b radios between the house and barn and the trailer has an LTE router/wifi repeater that picks up wireless from the barn.
Not super complex but no single nighthawk is gonna do it and the unifi management interface does the job. I'm not cloudy though.
Probably not big by US standards, but WiFi attenuation across multiple floors is such that an AP in the living room won't provide any decent signal one floor straight up. Depends on the materials and layout of your house...
This also means you can re-use a frequency with just one floor in between and no issues, and with a horizontally directional antenna, possibly even on adjacent floors.
I run two AP's hard wired to the PoE switch in my closet. These AP's being in the hallways on opposite sides of my home. I run them at lower power so I don't have an excessive amount of RF blasting into neighbor's homes, but I still get good signal quality to/from each AP. Because I now have two AP's running on different channels I've effectively doubled my network throughput overall.
One important thing to think about when planning your WiFi deployment is if you have things that have poor connectivity, everything on that channel suffers. I can have several devices running at several hundred megabits of quality, but a single device being really slow bogs down the channel and suddenly everything else starts getting lots of jitter and overall poor network performance despite most devices having good signal quality. Also, your device may show it has good signal strength but it might be poor quality (bad SNR) so in reality its a poor link speed. Having things physically closer usually results in better average SNR, meaning higher speeds for everything on the channel.
Also, as others have mentioned 5GHz might make it through a wall without a lot of stuff in it, but its not going to penetrate very well through several walls. Having my AP's in the hallways means there's usually only one wall with minimal stuff in it between a device and the AP, so each device usually reports at least several hundred megabits of throughput possible.
I feel the same way - my Nighthawk is going strong with custom firmware, but my friends with Ubiquiti gear try to get me to replace it with a bunch of Unifi stuff every time I talk to them.
Depends a lot on the house. My house is <2000 sqft, but signal, especially 5Ghz propagates poorly though old school plaster walls.
It wasn’t a problem until covid when multiple meeting or other streams just performed poorly on a marginal network. The Ubiquiti gear made it easier to run antennas for optimal signal.
The hot thing to do is to shit on them, but I’ll be sticking with it. They’ll emerge better from this crisis and if you think that any competitor in this price point is better, you’re delusional.
COVID had me setting up more UniFi APs. It held up incredibly well for moving large files across VPNs and running multiple Zooms for work places and school.
COVID must have been a massive boost to their bottom line.
I’m no market analyst, but the last year, even including the last week, has been very good to Ubiquiti.
My house had a problem since the cable came in on one corner of my house, and my office was on the other side. Browsing was ok but things like video calls suffered, at least until I went with a Unifi BeaconHD.
Getting signal to devices isn’t a problem, but it’s not easy having an AP receive signal from a low power device. Multiple APs is the way to go in my experience.
First problem is 5GHz is terrible at going through walls, I don’t believe it will even go through a single brick wall and maintain decent bandwidth. Even 2.4GHz is considerably slowed by 2 or 3 drywall/plywood obstructions.
Second problem is can the mobile device you’re using return that signal through all those walls to the access point. I have noticed an huge increase in quality and snappiness of FaceTime and other high up and down bandwidth activities once I added more access points so that connections are going through only 2 or 3 walls.
For another reference, I have a hotel that needed to upgrade its network to meet the brand standards for signal strength in all the rooms, and we had to end up installing 6 access points in the drop ceiling of each hallway 15 guest rooms in length (each guest room is ~15ft wide, so the corridor was ~225ft long). It resulted in the elimination of almost all guest complaints about the wireless network.