Mesh Wifi and separate SSID

I'm think ing of getting a wifi 6 mesh system having just moved to a larger house with flaky wifi. The issues I see are that all the systems I'm looking at allocate the 2.4/5ghz ssid from one channel and as I have a number of 2.4 switches and doorbell I would like to be able to have a system that has them separate.

There are a number of people that seem to have had issues with this and have got round it with various hacks.

https://www.tech21century.com/separate-ssid-for-2-4-...

I'm not comfortable doing this and wondered if anyone knows of a system that has 2 separate SSID's?

Edited by deleted (Mon 04-Oct-21 12:22:32)

Your link just gives me "Invalid Parameters Specified". I am not a member of the Netgear community.

In reply to a post by stevewhits:

I'm think ing of getting a wifi 6 mesh system having just moved to a larger house with flaky wifi. The issues I see are that all the systems I'm looking at allocate the 2.4/5ghz ssid from one channel and as I have a number of 2.4 switches and doorbell I would like to be able to have a system that has them separate.

There are a number of people that seem to have had issues with this and have got round it with various hacks.

https://www.tech21century.com/separate-ssid-for-2-4-...

I'm not comfortable doing this and wondered if anyone knows of a system that has 2 separate SSID's?

It all just depends on the manufacturers and their software.
For example, on the TP Link kit I've got (admittedly it's only 802.11ac, not 802.11ax), I can configured it whichever way I want, with multiple SSIDs which can be set as either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz...or both.

Pretty sure the same can be done with the Ubiquiti kit.

Ubiquiti should do it ... https://ui.com/wi-fi#compare

Yes they do. Up to 8 SSID's per radio at any one time I believe. But there will be performance issues with that number of SSID's. Better to stick to a lower number, however doesn't sound like the OP will be troubling that limit.

It is also possible to define multiple WLAN Groups per site (potentially with various SSID's in each WLAN Group) and then decide to implement a given WLAN Group on one, a subset or all access points.

I currently have 3 SSID's mapped to 2 networks (VLANs) on my Ubiquiti AP's.

Ubiquiti also have other niceties like moving AP traffic to quieter channels to alleviate WLAN interference, bandwidth profiling/limits, network isolation, guest hotspot, RADIUS integration etc. All the stuff you'd expect on gear that is aimed at the business market, but can happily do domestic stuff. Albeit pricier than many of the Taiwanese mass market stuff, and with some additional complexity to setup, but once going is pretty good.

I use a few of the capabilities - Guest Hotspot for example.

What I did find is that I used to have 4 or 5 WAPs dotted around to get decent coverage. When it was suggested "start with two" I was sceptical, but took te advice. I still have just two and can get >200Mbps from anywhere in te ouse or garden. A good investment

Yes its an odd thing to try and explain or summarise to folks - the behaviour of radio waves, with obstacles, walls and a variety of other things to contend with. The difference between a 'strong' 2.4 GHz network and a 'weak' 5 GHz network when they are coming from the same AP.

Then the counter-intuition of turning the power *down* on access points rather than up, to boost throughput, especially where you have overlapping cell coverage.

There is definitely an element of black magic as well as physics and science

I've spent a lot of time in those black arts.

I also found on a very dense network, I needed four channels and 1, 5, 9, 13 worked extremely well, overall throughput and number of happy users was much better than 1, 6, 11 ...