My CFO / real-estate mogul has been renovating a new house for his family for about a year and a half now – and now that he’s moved in, he has discovered a network shortcoming that I’ve been tasked to fix.
See, he bought the place off of some relatives who moved back to Taiwan, and then decided he’d live there after a quick $750,000 renovation. But during this renovation he decided to run everything with wifi as to not see cable jacks / cat6 anywhere… Which isn’t necessarily a bad idea these days, but said house is probably 6000 square feet over three floors and easily a hundred yards from end to end. Hell, the living room area is almost the size of my entire house… There’s even a new six car garage separate from the main house (which has a three-car garage), and it needs internet access as well…
It’s an amazing house, but the scale alone is a challenge for wifi – and that’s before he filled the place with a half dozen TVs, ten Sonos speakers, a wifi-based security system, a dozen wireless cameras, five computers, and all of the general wireless stuff that people have these days like phones, watches, appliances, etc.
Another challenge to this whole thing is said CFO is very much “form over function” and will invariably hamstring himself in order to not see the tech he’s so reliant upon. This is how you get things like the Comcast router, the old wifi router, the camera servers, the security system, and the two IoT hubs for the dozen wireless temperature / water sensors down in the basement in the tiny room that houses the two furnaces and two water heaters and is generally over 100 degrees…
And this is where I come in…
The first thing to fix was the old wifi setup he was using; an Amplifi HD with mesh extenders. This is a really good unit that I’m sure he bought for its looks, but it’s more designed for apartments and small houses – not palatial warehouse spaces that you can use a scooter to get around in. 🙂
So, I had him pick up a new TP-Link BE800 and three RE705X range extenders to replace the Amplifi, and then talked him into relocating his network gear from the basement furnace room to the main floor in a cabinet… And after he installed a bunch of holes in this cabinet and we patched the cable back to where the TV used to be – behind said cabinet – I installed the new Arris S33 modem, the new wifi router, and all of his old IoT hardware.
The hardest part of this was getting Comcast to let us use the new cable modem… That took about an hour.
And once this was done, we did some speed testing around the house and things were definitely better, but other things still didn’t work quite right… Like the Sonos speakers.
Doing some research on those Sonos speakers I’m fairly convinced that it’s not the wifi setup. My CFO has probably the most high-tech home wifi setup possible currently, and the Reddit r/sonos board as well as the official Sonos forums are pretty much wall-to-wall connectivity issues… I have an idea though; I’ll make an SSID specifically for the speakers on one of the 5Ghz radios, which should avoid band steering which seems to confuse them, and see if that helps.
It’ll take some tuning over the next few weeks, but I’m pretty sure I can get his remaining issues ironed out.
Listening to "Follow You Follow Me" by Genesis