On a recent trip to the UK to visit relatives, I heard that most dreaded of phrases - "can you help us with our internet connection?". Of course, its phrased as a question, but the expectation is yes, and woe befall you if you say anything but yes.
In this instance, the property was a country property, over 100 years old. Originally built as a schoolhouse, the walls were about 30cm thick, made of stone. Over the years the building had been added to, with a floor added above, and some of the external (thick) walls had ended up as internal walls. Being out in the country, the only available internet connection was ADSL, and this property was the furthest one from the exchange to be able to get ADSL, with some further properties down the lane being too far away (and the wiring being too old). The network in the property had been "installed" by a local electrician, who also did satellite installations and internet. This sparky had done a deal with my relatives, and their ADSL connection was shared with those further down the lane who could not get a connection. This was facilitated by a PTMP wireless network mounted on the wall of the schoolhouse, and beaming the shared internet connection to other houses. The sparky had chosen Ubiquiti equipment for this link, and it worked well.
Inside the house however, things were not so well laid out. The property was too old to have any sort of structured cabling, but when some renovations were done my relatives had arranged for some Cat5 to be run in the newer parts of the house, which comprises a sort of home office. Within the house, there were three access points, each broadcasting a different SSID, all on the same channel, and with three different subnets. These access points were all connected back to the ADSL router, and thence to the internet.
Problems:
- Roaming - there was none between access points
- Printing - only users connected to the same subnet as the printer could print (there was no routing between the three subnets)
- Coverage - yes, well
- knowledge - my family had no diagrams (because they did not exist) and did not know the router passwords
I whipped out my trusty survey utility on my tablet (we all travel with survey utilities on our tablet, don't we??) and had a walk around the property. The placement of the three APs was "suboptimal" (I'm being polite) and the coverage was less than one bar in large areas of the house - one of the complaints was "I can't read my email when I'm in bed".
Temporary resolution:
- Created a network diagram, and got the passwords from the local sparky
- Routing - enabled routing on the ADSL router between the subnets, and set the DHCP scopes to send the gateway address.
- Printing - solved by the above
- Roaming - can't do much about that, its a full disconnect/reconnect
- Channels - changed the settings so each of the three APs were on the classic 1,6,11.
- Coverage - tweaked the location of the APs where I could - I found the upstairs AP was tucked in behind the hot water cylinder (it looked neater); of course wifi looooves metal and water, it's no wonder the coverage in that direction was bad.
Long term resolution:
Recommended the purchase of a Google home mesh wifi solution. One of my families neighbours had the same equipment and would be able help set it up for them after I left. I hear that its all much better now.