Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.
It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc.
Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.
My setup at home is:
Motorola Surfboard SB6183
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X
Uniquiti Unifi AP
I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP.
If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try:
- partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear
- build an app to make the APs easy to setup
- work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick
- sell them on Amazon
Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?
I think the OP question touched on problems existing, but small enough for many to "accept them" as status quo, and him/her questioning if he/she was the only one bothered by them. I am one of those people too. Thus my question of whether or not you actually have no problems, or simply "no problems requiring intervention, other than waiting/reconnecting".
Our internet has gone down (Uverse fiber), but that's outside of our home and there's little we can do about it.
My phone - a Nexus 5X - is probably the flakiest bit of tech that I have. I reboot it every 10 days or so. The next worst is the AT&T DVRs. They are terribly designed, painful to use, and have bugs.
Most of the tech in my house (Canon printer, QNAP raid box, Hikvision cameras, PS4, Roku, Wii-U, Onkyo receiver, Samsung and Toshiba televisions, iPads, iPhones, Samsung Tablet, Thinkpad, MacBook, gaming PC, Kindles, etc...) have basically no recurring problems. We've had brown outs where the power goes down but not off that made me have to go reboot everything, but other than that, no real problems. Our VitaMix blender does blow one breaker, but that's not really a tech issue.
Correct. It just works. The base station I have is also really old at this point. It is the larger flat one without simultaneous 5g bought ~2008. I bought it after I went through some of the other cheaper options that would cause my VPN to drop randomly throughout the day.
I want to upgrade to something with the newer standards and more speed, but I'm worried about going back to an unstable connection. I've been thinking about either the Netgear R6400 or the Google wifi 3 pack.
There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...
The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.
Thank you for the tip!
Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked.
The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync.
But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc.
That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.
Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi.
Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel?
But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.
I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?
I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.
a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.
testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.
Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.
I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.
0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...
> Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses.
... I think fits with the question the OP asked, and my follow up to. Since it's not a binary, and people have different levels of acceptance, and different levels of work put in to getting that number closer to 1 than 0, that is my issue. A stable router and wired devices "just works" for at least the last couple of decades.
I can likely get a better WLAN than the one I have, but I have already put in more time than I'd like to. At this point if I can't throw money at it, I'll rather just throw money at installing cat6a, which I did for the stuff I cared about (desktop, htpc, server).
> I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time.
Contradicting as it is to your first statement, do you really mean this though? Or is it simply "works well enough, within reasonable efforts, means and expectations"?
I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc).
I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had.
Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had.
I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most.
I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath.
[0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.