I’m thinking about upgrading my W-Fi and I was curious what wireless access points (WAP) people are using. I’m currently using a Netgear R7800 running OpenWRT.
Fritzbox boxes.
They tick all the checkboxes
- good standards support (including dect protocol if you want to have an ip phone or even iot protocols)
- fast wifi speeds
- cheap (at least for the second hand in ebay)
- super stable, never had a problem with them in 5 years or more
- fast roaming support out of the box
It is a well known brand in Germany but pretty unknown outside that country. Honestly it is the best bang for buck I was able to get.
Honestly, I would spend 10 minutes checking on them
I really like them but they do have two downsides for “more advanced” users (or at least for me) - it is a home device as after all.
- No support for VLAN or VLAN tagging - you can set up you WiFi and a guest WiFi. You can also map the guest network to an Ethernet port. But that’s about it.
- There is no way to change the DNS suffix (*. fritz.box) to another value - I do own a domain that I use for the local services on my home server, etc. which then allows for Let’s Encrypt certificates, but I cannot use it “out of the box”.
If you’re an advanced user, there’s plenty of ways around that, though. I just wished that these two thing were to exist in the firmware to have less work with my home infrastructure.
2nd hand Ruckus.
They’re decent quality that you’d see in a commercial / enterprise setting (so PoE), but Ruckus also have their “Unleashed” firmware which removes the need for a WLC.
I have 2 in a mesh at home and easily support many IoT devices, phones, laptops, etc on multiple SSIDs
Used 2nd hand sounds great, but the price range online is huge. Which units would you recommend and about how much should I expect to pay for them?
I’m using R600 - these are now EOL, so their price should be more reasonable (ie <60 £/$/€) - up to you if you want / need to pay a little more for someone to have flashed Unleashed onto it.
But definitely check there’s a download of Ruckus Unleashed for the model you want.
Thanks. That’s helpful. I decided to get an R720 I found on Ebay for $60. I’m not sure if it was a good choice but I’m excited to try it out!
Went all in with UniFi some time back. No regrets.
Currently running a few U6s. No real motivation to upgrade to U7s.