Ask HN: How to set up home wireless for reliable WFH | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to set up home wireless for reliable WFH

1 pointwegs6 comments

I have a wifi network at home, with my cable provider's highest tier of service. I have a nice wifi routers. My cable provider sometimes has outages. As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks, and I do run into wifi issues on the other end of the home.

I'd like reliable, robust internet. Ideally, I would have:

1) Cheap cable service and some kind of cheap backup services (e.g. DSL) as a seamless fallback

2) Some kind of mesh network which covered the whole home with reliable wifi

I am interested in having a secure router, which won't get compromised tomorrow, and which firewalls the house. I am uninterested in having a cloud router, which spies on me, and sends off my internal data to Google or some company in China.

Any recommendations on how to set something like this up?

I don't need a ton of bandwidth. I do need reliable ssh connections which stay up and have low latency.

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Just a question: you wouldn't happen to have coaxial cable in the house, right? If so, you could use an adapter to run ethernet over it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008C1JC4O/

I agree with the other poster, if you want reliability then there is no substitute for ethernet. Anything else will simply have lower reliability.

That said, I'd personally try HomePlug (ethernet over powerline) solution first. I was not able to get that stable and have tried two generations of the technology.

If it works -- fine, if not, I'd try mesh products like Eero next. They're owned by Amazon though, which I personally wouldn't like. I did hear some good reviews on the ATP.fm podcast, who usually are quite critical.

> As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks, and I do run into wifi issues on the other end of the home.

> I'd like reliable, robust internet.

>Any recommendations on how to set something like this up?

For at least the WiFi issues, the answer is: don't use WiFi. Use Ethernet cables and you will have reliable, robust connections. Which means (exclusive of a comcast outage) "reliable ssh connections which stay up and have low latency".

> I am interested in having a secure router,

Building your own from a PC, plural ethernet cards, and Linux is one way to know exactly what the router is, and is not, doing. It is also not going to become obsolete tomorrow because the maker no longer releases firmware upgrades for it. However you are also taking on the effort of upgrading things yourself as necessary to maintain security.

> For at least the WiFi issues, the answer is: don't use WiFi. Use Ethernet cables and you will have reliable, robust connections. Which means (exclusive of a comcast outage) "reliable ssh connections which stay up and have low latency".

I don't think I'm allowed to punch holes in the walls as would be needed to run Ethernet.

As a point of curiosity: Typical wifi is now faster than typical ethernet. I did benchmarks. Although both my computer and router advertise gigabit, they typically negotiate to 100M. I tried swapping cables, so it's not just random cable issues. Wifi gives consistently higher speeds than ethernet. Of course, 100M is plenty, and as you point out, does give better reliability.

> However you are also taking on the effort of upgrading things yourself as necessary to maintain security.

That's my concern. Cost of maintenance becomes astronomical. I'm not a sysadmin by trade, and I'd need to stay on top of zero-days and similar. Plug-and-forget is nice.

I'm comfortable with the middle ground of trusting the vendor, so long as they say they're not monitoring things and they're reasonably credible. Thing is, most vendors seem to advertise cell phone apps, Alexa integration, and other stuff which necessitates sending my privates all over the web.

You don’t have to punch holes in walls.

Edit to clarify: most houses I’ve lived in, the internal doors could easily fit an Ethernet cable under them when closed. It’s not pretty but if it’s mostly routed along walls behind furniture you’ll likely not notice it that much.

100mbit is not “typical” for new, non bargain-basement equipment in 2020.

If they aren’t connecting at gigabit reliably one of the three things (router/switch, computer, Ethernet cable) either not rated for gigabit or is faulty.

I had some similar symptoms with an isp provided Huawei fttp ont+router. I ended up plugging the computer (along with a network a3 printer) into a little desktop gigabit switch and it’s all been peachy since then.

The moral of the story is that isp provided devices are usually worse than bargain basement because you aren’t even getting the savings.

If possible I’d either replace it, or if you’re on eg docsis (aka cable) and can’t find a reliable one aftermarket, put their device in bridge mode, and run a good quality router of your own.

Running wires would be profoundly impractical. The home has stairs, and the whole layout is profoundly non-conducive to running wires. It'd be a massively long wire, running along floors, walls, and ceilings. Even if I decided to do that, I'm not the sole deciding party. Everyone at home needs to be happy, and I don't think anyone else would agree to that. I could do powerline or something, but I really think wifi is the way to go here.

The wifi is robust when it goes to make desktop in my bedroom, which has a PCI wireless card with a proper antenna. Where it fails are things like laptops. That's why I'm pretty sure a good mesh network would get us there.

100mbit was with Netgear+Intel equipment, and swapping several cables. I even bought a fancy new cable on Amazon, just in case that was an issue. The equipment isn't 2020, but it's definitely not bargain-basement either.

The problem with wifi, in a crowded environment, is the lost packets from the crowding. Which you allude to here:

> As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks

Every single wifi network other than your own is a source of interference for yours, and interference impacts latency first, then when the interference gets bad enough, throughput is impacted.

You can paper over the issues with stronger signals, for a time, until the density of the surrounding networks grows (or others begin strengthening their signals because your stronger signals are now causing them excessive interference). But you can never escape the interference without moving somewhere very rural where you are the only wifi close enough to detect.

You can escape some of the wireless interference by switching to 5G wireless (much shorter range, so fewer other 5G wireless networks will be in range to cause interference and a much larger number of channels, so fewer collisions), but then you have to be operating within that shorter range of your own AP, which could again mean running some ethernet to bring the transmitters closer to where you need them to be to operate reliably.

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