Unifi Wireless Planning and Tuning

tom here from orange systems unifi has a lot of great documentation about how to set up wi-fi networks how to deploy them and they've got a lot of reading if you want to take the time to read through all their documentation manuals but a popular question that comes up is what is the best settings most optimal settings and no one really likes the answer it depends now i'm going to share our real world information because my knowledge about how unifi works doesn't just come from reading the manual it comes from deploying the product real world experience we deploy these all the time we build out large-scale networks we build lots of small networks more so than large-scale ones we build out things of all shapes and sizes some indoor some outdoor et cetera and that's one thing i wanted to dive into and talk about and i had done this because i was working with a client this morning and there is 787 people connected when we were doing some adjustments and looking at something unrelated actually to uh directly to what we were doing unify and to give you another idea of the scale of this particular network that i was on there were 1819 people connected in the client history first for the last seven days and i say this not at all to brag but to give you context from where i come from with my perspective on unifi it is not just because i read it it's not because i set it up in a lab in a studio and connected five or six devices it's because we have experience building these devices at scale so i want to share some of the knowledge with you and some of it might be kind of surprising that we leave the settings at default we're going to talk about some of the deployment some of the details where you can read as well all the details of how to set this up but first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you like to hire a sharp project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.lawrencesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now the first place we're going to start is actually in our office now i mentioned large deployments obviously my office is a really small deployment this is about a 2 000 square foot floor plan here with three devices and we only need two well one would probably be enough for this building this is a common question of how many do i need well do you really need speed or do you just need connectivity i bring it up like that because in the business world speed is often secondary to stability there are probably edge cases use cases that people have where they need really high speed internet and office but the majority of the time and majority of the business clients we deal with they want solid connectivity they want their shipping department to be able to have a laptop which is a couple scenarios we have with clients like this that can go through in the warehouse have connectivity scan guns for example where they have to go and scan parts and warehouses or we even have forklifts that have little tablets well they're similar to a tablet attached to them and need to wander around and we're talking kilobits of data is all they send they care a lot about connectivity they care a lot about stability but speed it just wouldn't make any difference if you had really fast or really slow it all ties back into applications this is where there's always this confusion of people clamoring and asking me when i'm going to review the latest fastest what's the speed test on these and that's just not something that comes up in business if you need something fast and right now you know we just we're looking at more clients that need some 10 gig connectivity um well that exceeds wi-fi and for people that need that level of speed it's always going to be hardline that's just where we are wireless has not replaced the cables that need to connect things at higher speed the need for these higher speed connectivity is well it's still outpacing the speed at which wi-fi can happen and wi-fi still well problematic rf signals are affected very easily by all kinds of different parameters the contents of the walls people walking around literally people walking around will deflect and bend wi-fi signal that's one of the reasons why when you're looking at your wi-fi planning scenarios and this is just the floor plan that to our building uploaded into the unified controller and you use the little wall drawing tool when we'll draw another wall just to show you how it works and we'll draw a let's see we'll put half a foot or one foot thick uh but even thicker taller there we go height and this is just so we're gonna draw a giant brick wall here and deflect the wi-fi now after you draw these occasionally i have had to do this refresh the page so it redraws properly and you can see where well it's starting to bend the signal based on the wall now this is all theoretical and not necessarily real world where you can see how it's reshaping the wi-fi the reality is always going to be slightly different because we're making assumptions that the wall will diffracted this much we don't know exactly how much the wall is going to have an effect on there so when you're planning out and putting these in more is better especially for high density applications i've seen people criticize projects we've done and it's just mind-numbing to me because literally it's in the documentation of unifi talking about why more is better and of course people seem to think this is a ploy from ubiquity to sell more equipment but it's not problem is with wi-fi as i stated when you don't have line of sight you have lots of random we don't know what was put in the walls by the people who built them or occasionally we'd come in and don't know what's going to be you know really causing some interference so having a higher density solves that problem and line of sight is your best so for example schools put one in each room i've had people say we'll just throw a couple in the hallway between a few classrooms and then we're going to have 30 kids in each classroom and the density listing was hey it can support up this many you know clients attached to it and i'm like no no no you can't just plan it based on that so more is better because of the number of connections you need now let's get back to a little bit more details in the planning ubiquity has a great write up over here on like how to do high density and a couple of minor changes you need for those they also have a solid and i'll leave links to all this below a unified network tips and tricks but for the most part if you start out with really good planning and figuring out that there's no channel overlap you'll solve the majority of the problems and let's talk about exactly how you see the different network overlaps and by the way unifi has built in and they call it the unify ai system call it fancy names if you want all it does is scan channels and calculate the overlap between the devices it's actually really easy you can just go to the auto channel and have it scan and calculate this for you and apply it it's really simple you can also go here and we're going to pull up the settings on this device right here which is just a nano and you go over here to the config have the radios and i just have it set to auto pick some of these now i specifically had a channel because i was doing some testing so i have this picked rather than auto but you can go through and 99 of the problems are solved just leaving it auto it's only managed by exception it's the rule that we have to tell people all the time so much of the consulting work we do is getting people to set things back to auto because they come in and they set it up and they figure they have to manually fine tune everything one by one and set the minimum rssi and everything else that is manage by exception start at auto see if you have problems if you don't go from there now let's actually look at the wi-fi scan and the tools that are built right in here so we can see this information let's pop this out now this nano supports scanning on both 2g and 5g to determine the rf environment and the interference and these are the different channel widths i'll leave a link to a video i have on what the different channel would do and how that works i also have another video on wi-fi roaming and that is also will be linked below so i can kind of skip over those topics you could do the deep dive in those videos if you're already familiar with those two topics carry on and what we're looking for is where we have the least amount of interference and let's look right here at the 40. all right i have one percent one percent zero zero zero two most of these are pretty wide open we have nine percent over here and obviously i'm in a very great wi-fi environment where i don't have to contend with people up against me that are pushing too much wi-fi and causing those problems which is exactly what we want if you are in an environment where there's too much wi-fi interference and overlap well in that case you're going to want to let's say these channels and this side was overly occupied you want to go as far away from that as you can you're just steering it to a different channel it's really as simple as that and doesn't need to be over thought next thing is when you have your more than one unifi device in the same area make sure the channels of those devices don't overlap the roaming does not require you to have things on the same channel as long as the ssid is the same and this is part of how unified deploys there's once again reference to my roaming video when you have this setup it'll roam between them and the system is allowed to change channels at will this works really well because you can then not have the two devices fighting with each other and they'll stay on the device you need to manage by exception is one of the things i said and let's talk about one thing you may have to tune now this is an occasional tune not even an all the time thing unify understanding and implementing minimum rssi they have an article on it by the way for almost any topic i'm talking about here there's an article on it from unifi to break down how this works and how to determine and configure minimum rssi what this does is you want devices to favor a specific access point so what you'll do is you configure the minimum threshold by which they will stay attached to an access point before they switch over to the next one this is one of those things where people do have problems where you have clients that are in between so they'll kind of go back and forth and they may hang on to the weaker one a little bit longer and this is more of a client side problem but you can kind of force their hand so to speak and push the clients over by sending a d off frame or a move frame to get it over uh to the other access point so this is something you may have to tune but for the most part leaving that off has generally been to me a better solution and putting more wi-fi devices if you have a user that's always sitting right dead center between two access points or you have a density of users especially you may want to throw one more access point in the middle there including and i did this even at my house which i'm going to be doing a video about home wifi soon and i put one of those in-wall hd's in they're great because i wanted really solid connectivity at my home office but the rest of the house just needs general connectivity so i have it set up and i don't need any rssi changes i left them at default because yes the default works great so when i'm in my home office i can immediately my laptop goes that signal is like within a few feet of me i'm gonna work great and my phone has a solid connection in there and because it's in the front of my house it reaches right outside and devices outside such as my tesla connect fine this is the solution is to put more devices and unify in my opinion makes this relatively expensive their lack of license fees combined with a relatively low cost of ownership of their product i mean come on those in walls are 100 something dollars you can buy one of those and now you've solved a small office that is on the edge of some connectivity problem and that is generally a solution so when you're doing the planning more is better it's not just some scam to get you to click the link to buy more of their product it does solve the problem now a couple other finer details i want to dive into this is the bowling alley project and i can leave a link to this video as well i did and it's up and running and been done for about a year and unfortunately 2020 has not been good for keeping bowling alleys open uh because of the lockdowns etc but not to get too off topic there's not many people there's what i'm trying to get at so i don't have any stats to show you of high density but at their peak yes they had right around a thousand people that were hitting this network and it was working great like i said my experience comes from deploying these these are the settings that are on this network and you're going tom you must have all these finely tuned and details where you set the radios at some very special area this is actually called the arena wi-fi here and uh let's see auto um yep that's it auto auto and they're able to handle high density they have quite a few people in it's a bowling alley that actually is rather popular prior to the events of 2020 they were quite packed all the time and we literally leave a lot of these things at auto and we didn't have any problems to manage by exception by now like i said before if you have some of those people who are not going and you need to put an extra one yeah that's when you start looking but for the most part when we deploy these you leave it on auto and it's amazing just how well this works same thing with that wi-fi ai you turn it on it goes through all the networks it looks at all the overlaps it sets all the channels and you'll leave it be you pick a time that is good for doing the scan time which 3 am not many people connected it does a scan and it'll actually go through here and it lets me know what channels got changed i've been playing around with this prior to this video so there's more changes happening than usual but this actually works it's not that hard of a calculation to do and unify seems to get this right so i know this is probably not the video some of you are hoping for diving deep into tom what are all the million fine tuning settings but i'm giving you a very realistic result of the consulting we do where we fix a lot of things by turning them back to default because people played with them people changed a whole lot of random settings because the defaults are designed to be very compatible and work really well now a little bit of fine-tuning you know though if you are a home user and you do want the absolute best performance you can turn on the wider channel width and things like that but you will yeah break compatibility and i'll have a video that i'll link to like i said that i talk about that i mean obviously if you're trying to optimize for speed that's different but for most of the business deployments and most people that are looking for stability the default settings do work hopefully this was helpful uh take the time to read through the documentation for some of the details on when you're building out these systems but the unifi actually they they themselves tell you it's default and you you think about it if there was a better default they would probably make it the default that's how a lot of companies work actually thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to lawrencestems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.lawrentsystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 89,027

Rating: 4.9479494 out of 5

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: -vSSYmR1XLY

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020