BEST WiFi Optimization Settings!

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is chris and today we're going to talk about how to optimize access points for the best possible coverage ever or in other words if you have multiple access points in your home or business these are the steps that you need to take to make sure that those access points play nicely with each other and provide the best coverage for your wireless clients i'm going to be demonstrating this with unify however these same concepts should apply regardless of the make and manufacturer of the access points that you happen to be using so these concepts are going to be the same if you're using unify or tp-link or aruba or cisco or whatever mostly this information is going to be exactly the same i should also say that if you only have a single access point a lot of the stuff i'm going to talk about won't make any difference but there are definitely some tips that you can still utilize for environments where you just have one access point if you haven't already make sure that you like this video and subscribe to crosstalk solutions for more tech videos just like this one and if you are looking to purchase unify equipment access points switches firewalls whatever use my link down in the description below that is absolutely the best way that you can help crosstalk solutions and help us keep providing this type of content for you that is of course an affiliate link it does not change your price whatsoever but it does get us a few bucks for the referral and we absolutely appreciate every single referral that we get all right so let's start off by talking about the environment my test environment that i have set up here i am using a udmse and if we click on devices we we can see that i have installed three different u6 access points i have a u6 light an lr and a pro again this doesn't matter if you have all the same kind of access point if you have wi-fi five access points instead of wi-fi six access points almost everything that i'm talking about is going to be exactly the same this is just the test environment that i happen to set up so when i'm approaching a situation like this the first thing that i want to know is what is the surrounding environment like what other access points are near me that my access points are hearing quote unquote hearing and could potentially interfere with any wireless signals that i'm putting out so to do that in unify we want to click on wi-fi insights and that's going to show us basically our neighbors right our wireless neighbors who's around us in the surrounding homes and businesses now if you're not using unifi there are a number of tools that can do this same thing i like for instance the netspot app there's also a number of apps that you can get on android that will show you sort of the wireless spectrum and just you know what type of wireless devices and output power and channels are they using in your local area so on this screen we have access points that are split between 2.4 gigahertz spectrum and 5 gigahertz spectrum and we are going to deal with these two spectrums differently what i can see right off the bat here let's talk about 2.4 gigahertz so number one you can see that these ones here are kind of smaller you see this ranges from channel 4 to channel 8. we have one that goes from channel 9 to channel 13 and then we have some down here as well these ones that are these size are what we call a 20 megahertz channel width so channel width is one of the metrics that we're going to be using and one of the settings that we can change when we're setting up our access point optimization channel width essentially means how much or how little of the wireless spectrum is this device using now typically with 2.4 gigahertz we're going to have 20 megahertz channel width and 40 megahertz channel width now the larger the channel width the more bandwidth you're consuming or the more bandwidth your access point can possibly consume but the more susceptible interference right because if you have a very wide bandwidth or very wide channel width other devices in your area that are using some of that spectrum might possibly interfere more than if you had a more slender channel width in 2.4 gigahertz there are essentially three what we would call main channels that's channel 1 channel 6 and channel 11. so if we look at channel 1 here we can see there's 10 megahertz going this way and 10 megahertz going that way for a total of 20 megahertz channel width now look at this guy up here broadcom guest right so this guy is sucking up 40 megahertz channel width right and he's screaming very loudly you can see it's the largest access point signal or the largest wireless signal in the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum uh that you know it's one of my neighbors who just is blasting their access point and they made it as much bandwidth as possible which you know you can certainly do but if you're in an environment where you have a lot of access points around you like an apartment building or a business complex or even a neighborhood this is kind of rude right it's kind of besides which 20 megahertz channel width for 2.4 gigahertz is perfectly fine so i typically don't recommend sucking up a 40 megahertz channel width in the 2.4 gigahertz range unless you're like on a ranch where there's no other wireless signals around you you're not competing with anyone and no one's competing with you over here in five gigahertz it's a different story and we can see that there are different channel widths for five gigahertz uh five gigahertz is typically going to be 20 40 80 sometimes 160 megahertz channel width but there's a lot more spectrum so you can do sort of the standard for 5 gigahertz is 40 megahertz channel width which again is more than you would do in 2.4 gigahertz but there's also a lot more spectrum to play with in the 5 gigahertz range now some of these channels in here in the middle you'll notice those are completely empty those are what's called dfs channels and those are sort of reserved channels that you're really not supposed to use so we're going to deal with the stuff that is outside of that dfs zone on the lower end as well as the higher end and what we can see here is we've got some access points down here in 36 and 44. this one is very very low signal so not really a great chance that it's going to interfere with anything that we're doing up here we have again this broadcom guest is sucking up a lot of the the bandwidth over here and they're pumping out a really strong signal so if possible we're going to try to avoid uh this channel up here in the 5 gigahertz so basically what we're looking for here is where is the open air space right so i'm going to take a screenshot of this all right so here i've got my screenshot and now we're going to refer back to this in a little bit when we actually start configuring our devices all right so the next thing that we want to consider in our access point optimization is the placement of the access points within your home or business so to do this i am using the unify design center and you can see i just went online and i found you know generic 2 000 square foot house because that's probably about average that people might have that are watching this video and i've taken my three access points the u6 lite lr and pro and i have spread them out throughout this house in this case i took the ap the u6 lite and i put it out here in the garage to provide coverage for anything that you might have out in the garage you know a sono system or if you have a tesla or a smart car that connects to a wireless or you have a tv out in the garage something like that we're just providing some good coverage out there i put the ac the excuse me the u6 pro over here near the primary bedroom the master bedroom and then i have the lr over here by the sort of living room whatever this is over here as well as the bedrooms now i went through and i drew in some walls okay so you can see the gray are quote unquote interior walls and the red are exterior walls now the red walls if you look at the design center here really means like a brick concrete or other heavy material you know that's much more common in certain parts of the united states but certainly more common in europe and areas such as that so you might want to use these exterior walls if you have brick walls or concrete walls a lot of homes here in the u.s however are just wood and drywall and stucco maybe on the outside right or or sort of siding on the outside so i did use that for this design but again your mileage may vary right use the type of walls that you feel are going to be best for your own floor plan and then on the inside i use just standard interior walls which assumes you know wood and drywall so these walls do affect the wireless signals walls you know anything metal like a big fireplace or your stove or range those type of things are definitely going to affect your signal so when you're placing your access points the way that i do it is i like to put them sort of in centralized locations you can see that this pro that i put here kind of covers the kitchen and dining room area it covers the bedroom and the bathroom we all know how important wireless is to have in the bathroom and then the access point out here kind of just covers the garage area and then the lr is covering these back two bedrooms as well as the living room and sort of the miscellaneous areas on the right side of the house over here now with these filters so we can turn on and off our wireless coverage if we look at 2.4 gigahertz let me close out the walls again so they're not in the way if we look at 2.4 gigahertz we have some pretty decent coverage right anywhere that's red orange or yellow means that you've got very solid coverage in those particular areas when we get to the sort of greens and light blues that means the coverage is there but it's getting pretty weak like the signal is getting weak in those areas so now let's look at five gigahertz 2.4 gigahertz has much better penetration through obstacles so usually coverage wise 2.4 gigahertz isn't as big an issue as the 5 gigahertz stuff and what i'm looking to do here is just kind of make sure that the yellows of each of these radiuses are just barely touching each other right and you can move them around on here to see how the coverage changes to find the best placement of devices for your own environment but i think this is pretty good because we've got these two devices here the coverage is basically just barely touching each other with a strong signal as well as the one in the garage sort of same story so that's placement right that's access point placement but what about the channels that we talked about earlier so remember we took this screenshot that showed us what channels are available for 2.4 gigahertz we basically have 1 6 and 11 and since i have three access points here i'm going to set each one up on one of those channels so that they're not interfering with each other now big caveat here if you are doing mesh as in if you have a separate access point maybe out in your backyard that is not hardwired into your network but is using a wireless connection to connect to your network as well as provide connectivity to clients the channels make a big difference and i would look at a different video that i did called optimizing mesh wi-fi and i will put a link to that video down in the comments below for the purposes of this video we are not talking about mesh access points at all i am assuming that each one of these is hardwired into the network with an ethernet cable so since i have these three access points and i have essentially three 2.4 gigahertz channels that we can use i'm just gonna set one as channel one one is channel six and one is channel eleven i'm also gonna kind of put one and six as far apart from each other as possible so the garage is gonna end up being channel one the one over here on the right hand side is gonna be channel six and the one over here in the by the master bedroom is gonna be channel 11. so let me take a screenshot and i'm actually going to write that down okay so there we go as you can see i have put the u6 light on channel 1 the u6 pro on channel 11 and the u6 lr on channel 6. now let's talk about 5 gigahertz i have not done that yet and to do that we're going to go back into unify and we're going to start looking at some of these settings so if i click on my devices and then we look at the u6 light i'm going to click on settings let me put me over here in the other corner there we go and here we can see the settings that we are going to change now for 5 gigahertz here are our channels that we have available i'm not going to use anything that says dfs i'm going to use 36 through 48 and i'm going to use 149 up to 165. let's look at our coverage again and what are we seeing here so these i mean there's definitely some five gigahertz stuff over here in the 36 and sort of 44 area so 36 40 44 48 but there's a lot sort of less up here uh in this range so 149 through 165. so what i want to do here is i want to pick basically three different little areas i'm going to do 36 and i'm also going to do 48 so that should sort of push it up here in between 48 to 54 and then i'm also going to choose the top of the spectrum 165 up here because that doesn't seem like i have any neighbors using that whatsoever so those are going to be my three choices for the five gigahertz let's go ahead and add those now to our map okay there we go so i've got 36 then since it's closer in the same five gigahertz spectrum i put it to the furthest away access point channel 48 and then the one in between these two i move to the complete other end of the five gigahertz spectrum at channel 165. alright so at this point i have now dialed in the channels which to me is by far one of the most important and overlooked configurations when you are optimizing access points just making sure that the channels that all of these devices are broadcasting on are as clear as possible and as separated from each other as possible this is probably the most important thing that i'm teaching in this video alright so we will put that to the side for now going back to unifi let's actually start making these changes so first we're going to start with the u6 light and here we have the 2.4 gigahertz radio let me zoom this in a little bit as well as the 5 gigahertz radio settings down here so again channel width we have 20 or 40 we're not going to be channel hogs we're going to leave it on 20 that's going to be plenty fine for 2.4 gigahertz but channel selection we do not want to leave this auto we are going to set this to channel 1 as per our diagram here that we already mapped out now the other item in here that we may or may not want to change is transmit power or basically how loud is your access point screaming now if we look at the map here actually let's go back to the design center and let's turn on like five gigahertz or even 2.4 gigahertz right so 2.4 gigahertz in this garage is screaming really loud now that's not going to make too much of a difference in our scenario because we don't have other access points that are sharing channels but let's say i had a fourth access point you know out here on the rear porch well it's far enough away from the access point in the garage that the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum would probably share its channel 1 with the one that's furthest away but i also might then want to turn down the one in the garage basically turn down the output power such that the one in the garage is only providing enough wireless coverage to reach the garage and not extending or bleeding into the walls very much past that right so in those types of situations that's where you might want to change the output power or the transmit power excuse me but a lot of times i just leave this as auto okay so i very rarely leave channel selection auto but i almost always leave transmit power set to auto alright so moving down to 5 gigahertz again we've got 20 40 80 megahertz channel widths we don't want to be channel hogs we're going to leave it on 40 megahertz channel width but we are going to specifically select our channel and we chose channel 36 for the u6 light so let's go ahead and select channel 36 and then we're going to apply changes now let's move on to the u6 pro for the u6 pro that is 2.4 gigahertz channel 11 5 gigahertz channel 165. so let's go there settings here we go channel 11 transmit power auto leave the channel width at 40. we're going to do channel 165. there we go and apply those settings then we have the lr is our third one settings this is going to be 2.4 gigahertz channel 6 and 5 gigahertz channel 48 and apply those changes okay so those changes are now all applying for those access points and really that's about it okay so that is going to make sure that the placement of the access points is such that the signals aren't really interfering with each other too much in addition to that we changed the channels so that they're broadcasting on different channels which again reduces interference between the multiple access points and then from here if you're having any sort of issues you can further play with the transmit power mostly you're going to want to reduce transmit power on some access points that allows less interference for other access points that might need that are on you know perhaps the same channel okay so that's going to do it for this video what did you guys think about this did i miss anything are there any other tips that you would have included in this type of design or did i screw something up let me know down in the comments below as always if you appreciated this video one of the best ways that you can help out this channel is to utilize our ubiquity affiliate link it is down in the description below anything that you're going to purchase click that link first and we get a tiny kickback uh which we definitely appreciate all right thank you guys so much for watching and we will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 321,862

Keywords: WiFi Optimization, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, wifi optimization for gaming, wifi optimization android, wifi optimization iphone, wifi optimization pc, unifi wifi optimization, access point settings, best access point settings, best wifi settings, unify, unifi, ubiquiti, ubiquity

Id: iHBCWy6qDBs

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022