I am running into a lot of customers insisting on putting cheap WiFi cameras outside their metal buildings and expecting their WiFi to work on the other side of the Faraday cage. I think the right answer is "don't do that", but they don't listen. I don't think any of the solutions being discussed in this thread really addresses this problem. I do realize most ISPs don't have a customer base where it is normal to have a metal pole building as a maintenance shop, barn, man cave, etc.
I convinced one customer to call a CCTV company, which came out and installed wired (coax) analog cameras connected to an indoor network DVR with an Internet connection. That also eliminated the problem of each camera constantly streaming upstream video to a cloud DVR, the customer gets alerts and can remote into the DVR from his phone and view current or locally stored video. And he doesn't have to pay a monthly fee for the cloud DVR. It's amazing how when you "call the guy" and pay a few bucks, rather than getting a cheap Chinese DIY solution at Costco, it ends up being done right. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Coudron Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 5:01 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] Managed whole house mesh wifi We have been running into more and more situations where customers either have homes that are too large to effectively cover with a good router, or have so many devices at the far end of the house from where their router has to be positioned that we are looking for good options to provide better whole house coverage. We have worked with Powerline extenders, but consider them to be too inconsistent for wide spread use, and have worked with some wireless extenders. The wireless extenders have a pretty big impact on wireless speed that we aren't excited about them as a go forward solution. We also can't log into the powerline or wireless extenders without some port forwarding work in their main router. We have played around with some mesh options, particularly the Ubiquiti Amplifi product, which we really like, but feel like it is not an option since we cannot manage it remotely. Netgear Orbi certainly seems like a viable option, but kind of spendy if you need 3 nodes. Cost isn't necessarily an issue since customers will buy this equipment rather than us fund it, but we don't want the solution to be so expensive no one opts for it. I know there has been a few threads on managed routers, but this seems like a little bit different take since we are going to have customers buy the equipment, but would like to be able to manage remotely. I suppose one option would be to still provide an inexpensive managed router as we currently do and have them manage the mesh system on their own. Any thoughts on what has worked well for whole house mesh systems, especially in a remote management situation? Regards, David Coudron
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