Frankly I wonder at how big some of these peoples' houses are. My single seven year old Nighthawk router covers an entire 2300 square foot home and penetrates the brick walls to reach halfway up the street.
First problem is 5GHz is terrible at going through walls, I don’t believe it will even go through a single brick wall and maintain decent bandwidth. Even 2.4GHz is considerably slowed by 2 or 3 drywall/plywood obstructions.
Second problem is can the mobile device you’re using return that signal through all those walls to the access point. I have noticed an huge increase in quality and snappiness of FaceTime and other high up and down bandwidth activities once I added more access points so that connections are going through only 2 or 3 walls.
For another reference, I have a hotel that needed to upgrade its network to meet the brand standards for signal strength in all the rooms, and we had to end up installing 6 access points in the drop ceiling of each hallway 15 guest rooms in length (each guest room is ~15ft wide, so the corridor was ~225ft long). It resulted in the elimination of almost all guest complaints about the wireless network.
Make no mistake, it still "works" with just one, only slower.
Ah, the ones that have wire mesh underneath? That would do it.
I like UniFi in wall access points in the room I’m inside.
Not super complex but no single nighthawk is gonna do it and the unifi management interface does the job. I'm not cloudy though.
One important thing to think about when planning your WiFi deployment is if you have things that have poor connectivity, everything on that channel suffers. I can have several devices running at several hundred megabits of quality, but a single device being really slow bogs down the channel and suddenly everything else starts getting lots of jitter and overall poor network performance despite most devices having good signal quality. Also, your device may show it has good signal strength but it might be poor quality (bad SNR) so in reality its a poor link speed. Having things physically closer usually results in better average SNR, meaning higher speeds for everything on the channel.
Also, as others have mentioned 5GHz might make it through a wall without a lot of stuff in it, but its not going to penetrate very well through several walls. Having my AP's in the hallways means there's usually only one wall with minimal stuff in it between a device and the AP, so each device usually reports at least several hundred megabits of throughput possible.
I need new APs soon.
It wasn’t a problem until covid when multiple meeting or other streams just performed poorly on a marginal network. The Ubiquiti gear made it easier to run antennas for optimal signal.
The hot thing to do is to shit on them, but I’ll be sticking with it. They’ll emerge better from this crisis and if you think that any competitor in this price point is better, you’re delusional.
Works amazingly on heating and cooling bills, but it's a pretty solid wall to radio waves.
[0] https://www.ibhs.co.uk/foil-backed-mineral-wool-50mm-thick-x...
COVID must have been a massive boost to their bottom line.
I’m no market analyst, but the last year, even including the last week, has been very good to Ubiquiti.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ui/advanced-ch...
I possibly could have done it with two if I ignored the outside areas but one definitely wasn’t enough even with careful placement.
Edit: obviously 2.4ghz penetrates further, but 4k streaming on multiple TVs doesn’t go well with the bandwidth (and interference) on 2,4