Extending my home WLAN

Spring is here, and Summer is coming. Around my house that means it's time for some BBQ Smoking. Along with that comes live streaming of all kinds of content, and with the County Fairgrounds sharing the same tower my house uses, sometimes the 5G is less than desirable. After talking with Juniper's Jason Boardman at WLPC Phoenix this year, I've decided to try converting one of my Mist AP45s to Mesh and placing it in the garage to get the most of my coverage.

Rather than doing a full survey with Ekahau, I think today we'll just get a general sense of what the coverage is like using the brand new NetAllly Aircheck G3 I won on Drew Lentz's live podcast a couple weeks back. But first, let's review the service area in question.

The area we are looking to add coverage to is the 22'x24' Garage in the bottom left.

The "24" at the top of the pink box is where I'll be placing my Mesh AP. At this location I can receive 5GHz at -62dbm through a cinderblock wall to my reverse ceiling-mounted (yes it does make a difference) AP45 servicing the East Side of my house. It's worthwhile here to note that although this is an AP broadcasting 6GHz, the permeability of this higher spectrum is considerably limited when penetrating object/structures. The desired service area near the outside edge of the garage at the very bottom of the pink box shows a paltry -88dbm in 6GHz, and -78dbm in 5GHz when testing the signal on the Aircheck. This simply won't do!

We're going to be moving the AP45 I have in my lab rack (again in the basement) to the location with the strongest signal -62dbm @ 5GHz in the garage and form our mesh across 5GHZ. We'll be serving signal on 5GHz and 6GHz, 2.4GHz is off the menu and is reserved only for legacy devices and IoT applications currently, hopefully we have no need for it in this use case.

The red arrow indicates the AP45 being moved, and the blue arrow shows where it will backhaul to. It should be noted that the AP will be changing elevation by about 10'.

Setting up the mesh was possibly one of the easiest things I've ever done in Wi-Fi configuration. Simply Choose your AP, enable mesh networking, set as Base or Relay, and select a Group Number.

Setting the Mesh Base Station

Setting the Mesh Relay

I placed the AP on the top shelf which required drilling a few holes for my cabling. Here I opted to make a decision that may be unpopular to some folks. As I did not have a Cat5e/Cat6 cable of sufficient length to reach that I was willing to sacrifice, I opted to take some spare solid core Cat6 I had left from installing my house wiring and opted to run that, terminated in keystones and service-looped at either end. I was able to then connect the AP45 and AccelTex 90w POE Injector at either end using 6" Cat5E jumpers I had leftover from a Home Lab Build I had setup while at a previous employer. Some may balk at the use of Solid Core, but technically this is bounded on both ends, won't be moving, and allows me to use a smaller drill bit for my penetrations, and I believed this to be reason enough to go with this option. As for the Cat5E, since we're only sending power and not data I don't have concerns with this choice.

The APs were fully meshed and operational before I could put all my tools away.

Within Minutes the Mesh Status is visible in the Mist Portal

The Relay AP has been renamed to account for it's new location and it's backhaul information is clearly visible.

Every good engineer updates their documentation upon project completion and as such, the AP has been renamed and properly placed on the map.

An added feature Mist includes is a dotted line to indicate the Mesh relationship on the map. I find this to be very useful.

Testing results in 6GHz showing -55dbm and a quick speedtest shows me running 180/20mbps over my mesh backhaul and through my cable provider's network from my Pixel 7 Pro. Definitely good enough for a BBQ and a fun Sunday morning project.

Including this short post and note-taking this project took about 4 hours today, and went quick because I have a strong background in this tech and all of the materials were freely available in what may be considered a sizeable inventory of tools and hardware. If you're newer to the industry it may take a bit longer as you work on polishing your skills, and THAT'S OK! The key to implementing an infrastructure project of any size is gathering the scoping requirements and having a good plan of work. Cheers!