I’m thinking about upgrading my W-Fi and I was curious what wireless access points (WAP) people are using. I’m currently using a Netgear R7800 running OpenWRT.
Went all in with UniFi some time back. No regrets.
Currently running a few U6s. No real motivation to upgrade to U7s.
+1 on this. Though i picked up 2 u7’s. VLAN support, easy to maintain and lets face it, superior function from most retail APs. If you’re a power user, this is the way.
While expensive, UniFi hardware is just a huge step beyond the rest of the consumer market.
I’ve had literally 10x the range (5x vs 50m), in congested environments, compared to ‘gaming’ hardware. I actually did a side by side to test. I was shocked at the difference.
The bridging function is also a life saver. 2 LR units can get a reliable signal between each other, at ridiculous ranges.
Fritzbox boxes.
They tick all the checkboxes
- good standards support (including dect protocol if you want to have an ip phone or even iot protocols)
- fast wifi speeds
- cheap (at least for the second hand in ebay)
- super stable, never had a problem with them in 5 years or more
- fast roaming support out of the box
It is a well known brand in Germany but pretty unknown outside that country. Honestly it is the best bang for buck I was able to get.
Honestly, I would spend 10 minutes checking on them
Unifi. I’ve got a box of APs as ewaste just sitting in the basement. Every so often I would get more ewaste from companies I work with.
I don’t need the most demanding of wifi systems. I hardwire most of my stuff whenever possible. And I have a fairly small home. A single AP on the main floor, 1 AP on the basement. 1 AP in the detached garage.
Most of my wifi devices are iot things on their own vlan.
I wanted cheap and OpenWRT, so I got some GLinet Shadows. It has it’s own GUI, but if you go into Advanced Settings, you get the usual OpenWRT Luci interface.
You can set them up as APs or repeaters, and have failover connections. Pretty versatile and easy to use.
GL.Inet. OpenWRT at the core, and a solid hardware base to run on.
I love that GL.iNet stuff ships with OpenWRT (or apparently FreeRTOS in the case of the Thread border router I’m eyeing right now), but I wish they would make stuff like ceiling or wall-mounted PoE access points and rack-mountable wired routers. The form-factor is what stops me from choosing them over TP-Link devices that I have to flash OpenWRT onto myself.
Unifi U6 Mesh. Love the form factor
RT-AX88U it has a ton on high end features
Ruckus APs with wired backhaul OpnSense box runs the network.
I moved to Rukus from Unifi and the difference is night and day. Unifi does not play nice with Sonos and the firmware is rock solid compared to Unifi.
I bought a Grandstream GWN7660 last year and it seems pretty good, it replaced a ubiquity WAP that I still have legacy devices connected to.
Some TP-Link thing I got as a hand me down… It’s AP enough
I use the tp-link EAP615 wall Apps, they are great and run OpenWRT like a champ.
I use a cudy wr3000. Great value for the price and features official openwrt support.
I’m using a couple of TP-Link EAP225 ceiling-mounted PoE access points, and one EAP235-wall wall-mounted one, connected to my old TP-Link Archer C7 router (with the antennas disabled) running OpenWRT.
I’d like to replace the router with something rack-mounted, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
TP link EAP’s and i run the omada software controller on an existing server. Right now I have 3 AP’s and it’s been a great experience so far compared to running consumer wifi routers before. All are on ethernet too.