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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Any clue "How" did it fix everything?

With everybody's router blasting at High Power, what can you actually do on your side with just one router to compensate?

Thx muchly!

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Nearby networks won't harm your signal to noise ratio unless there is active traffic. Most of the time, 90% of the 30 SSIDs you see nearby are mostly inactive.

Anyway, Ubiquity and commercial gear in general just has better software and hardware design.

* The UAP‑AC‑HD has been around for at least 5 years and still gets updates. Wifi is full of weird bugs so its impossible to release a new chip set bug-free. Consumer gear just doesn't get the same duration of support as commercial. * These access points are designed specifically for setting up networks with multiple APs and lots of nearby networks. * These APs are just access points and offload routing and even their UI to a router and management server. A lot of consumer gear uses/wastes a lot of RAM on their fancy management interfaces. * Exterior profile stays the same. Consumer gear companies spend a lot of time & money on marketing and redesigning the 'look' of their products which diverts focus. * Better management/software: All the Unifi APs use the same management server software which consolidates features and fixes. The software also has a lot of performance related features like disabling/limiting the slowest speed enabled on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz network.

Really the last point is a really big one; consumer gear (besides new consumer mesh networks) is often sold on having great range/coverage but these can cause the whole network to be bogged down by a single device operating in 802.11g or older mode. Commercial gear expects you to use multiple APs to satisfy coverage but has the features to prevent network degradation.

It's really not power, it's just debugging and optimizing rates and retries. Lots of wifi has lots of dumb bugs that no one ever figures out, because stuff still mostly works, with all the built-in retries.

(I used to work for an enterprise WiFi AP vendor, debugged some driver bits myself ... back when 802.11n was brand new, all the enterprise vendors were increasing their effective throughput from 80mbps, to 100mbps, to 140mbps, etc, just by debugging and optimizing their drivers.)

Use DFS channels. I have a friend who is a streamer and lives in an urban setting... almost 100 5GHz APs are visible in a scan in her apartment. She was having constant issues that we tracked down to huge latency spikes due to the congestion for the non-DFS channels. It turns out that her cable company's wifi AP / cable-modems do not support DFS.

I got her a wifi AP that supports DFS, and she has not had any issues..

Note that I initially got her a fancy Netgear which claimed to support DFS, but we could never get it to work. I spent a week going in circles with their support and eventually returned it.

I eventually just gave her my several year old Atheros-based TP-Link router running DD-WRT. It was able to use DFS channels, and she has a channel to herself now.

Along with what everyone else has said some vendors such as Meraki and Ruckus have separate radios just designed for monitoring the spectrum and making changes accordingly. Groups of APs will automatically decrease their power and channel swap to avoid channel overlap etc.

Ubiquiti is enterprise grade gear, so first thing is this is not a router, it's just an access point, and it's optimized for lots of devices, lots of interference typical of office scenarios.

An an owner of a decent amount of Ubiquiti gear, it’s “enterprise” in the sense that the management system scales to lots of devices, and that’s about it. Every recent revision of the management tools makes it shinier and less usable.

For enthusiasts and small and medium businesses it is fine, but it definitely is not enterprise grade.

It’s pro-sumer, definitely not enterprise grade gear at all.

Agreed with the other comments here. I couldn't stand the Ubiquiti mgmt interface for home as it needed a VM or chroot plus a database instance, etc.. When I switched to an equally spec'd Ruckus, I was blown away at the performance difference. Also the mgmt interface a simple web interface. I couldn't be happier with my switch and will probably be sticking to Ruckus for my home for the forseeable future.

and at my initial google 10x the price lol

The Ubiquiti stuff has a lot of automatic channel selection stuff built in to use the best frequencies for your conditions.

Most APs do this already.

Most APs do this once at startup.

Gives you good benchmarks when you start it but over time fails in a noisy environment.

So cell breathing is effectively prevented?

I guess it comes down to how well they do it.

Maybe, but my experience with consumer grade network gear's software has left a lot to be desired. I'll never bother with Netgear/Linksys crap again.

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