For the vast majority of people the optimum placement of access points in their home is impossible with a combined router.
How do you know this? Have you personally visited every home to see where folks keep their router? Or perhaps you've done a YouGov survey on this? Please do share your source.
I would also say most people would not be happy with such a huge monstrosity in their living room
Again how do you know this? Perhaps you're assuming everyone thinks like you?
In general one or more UniFi AC LR's for example are a much better recommendation.
Why on God's earth would I use a 2x2 stream wifi access point (UniFi AC LR) when my current setup gives me 3 radios, each on 4x4 streams enclosed in a single "ugly" box which reach every nook & cranny of the home with speeds of >250 Mbps? Its a bit like trading in your Mercedes for a Ford Ka. You should really consider what's under the hood of hardware, not just the brand name
I will also be getting security updates long after your consumer device has been hung out to dry by the manufacture too. Something I consider very important.
Well, I haven't had my home network/router hacked yet so clearly the router software is doing its job. If consumer routers were getting hacked too frequently then I'm sure Tim Higgins on SmallNetBuilder.com would be advising everyone NOT to use a consumer router and instead spend £1000s on commercial grade routers with updates released every 2 mins.
You clearly don't realise/can't accept that people have different setups/requirements wrt hardware. What may work for one person doesn't mean it will work for another. What one person may consider "ugly", another person may think differently.
My main requirement is to have full wifi coverage in my home using the least amount of hardware. Ideally not screwed onto ceilings/walls, except CP equipment such as the Openreach ONT of course. Nothing in my home is connected by ethernet cable - everything is wireless, even the DECT VOIP phones connect by wifi using a plug-in Range Extender as they have ethernet ports only (no wifi built-in).
I want the hardware to easily cope with 40+ wifi devices connected simultaneously, cope with multiple 4K streams and allow me to prioritize bandwidth so that our VOIP phones get the highest priority and Mr Teenager's P2P downloads get the lowest priority. Given my environment - a relatively new 2 storey home with thin walls - I can get away with using a single 4x4 stream, tri-band router (Linksys EA9500v2) connected directly to the ONT. Perhaps if I lived in a larger house with 1 metre thick walls then yes, I would need access points/router but there's no way I would go around sticking access points on ceilings - primarily because i like to upgrade my hardware every few years. I would probably go for a high end wireless mesh system such as the Ubiquiti Amplifi or use another 4x4 router as an access point.
To give you an idea of how well my current setup performs: My work PC is upstairs at the far end of the house, has an Asus PCE-AC88 4x4 wifi card installed and this connects at 2.1 Gbps to the router. Real-world performance is nowhere near that but its close to 1 Gbps which is very good for a wifi connection, ie similar to a wired 1GbE connection. There's no way I would be getting that sort of wifi perfomance with a inferior UniFi AC LR access point. Even Ubiquiti's highest spec wifi access point (UniFi AP HD) only offers link rates of up to 1.7 Gbps on the 5Ghz band and comes with 1 x 5ghz band only.
Edited by deleted (Tue 29-Jan-19 14:03:48)
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