 Tom here from Orange Systems. Unify 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 Unify 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, etc. And that's one of the things 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 directly to what we were doing in Unify. And to give you another idea of the scale of this particular network that I was on, there were 1,819 people connected in the client history first for the last seven days. And I say this not as all too brag, but to give you context from where I come from with my perspective on Unify. It is not just because I read it. It is not because I set it up in a lab, in a studio, and connected five or six devices. It is 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 and my company, head over to laurancesystem.com. If you'd like to hire a short 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.laurancesystems.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 the 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 in warehouses, or we even have forklifts that have little tablets, well, they're similar to a tablet, attach 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 were looking at more clients that need some 10 gig connectivity, 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 is 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 UniFi 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, but even thicker, taller. There we go, height. And this is just so we're going to draw a giant brick wall here and deflect the Wi-Fi. Now, after you draw these, in case 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 diffract it 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 Unify 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 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 would 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 this many 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 the minor changes you need for those. They also have a solid, and I'll leave links to all this below, a Unify 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, Unify has built in and they call it the Unify AI system. Call it fancy means 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 is 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 managed by exception started 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 interference. And these are the different channel widths. I'll leave a link to a video I have on what the different channel widths 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 before you're 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 1% 1% 0 0 0 2. Most of these are pretty wide open. We have 9% 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 in 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 overthought. Next thing is when you have your more than one Unify 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 Unify deploys there's once again reference to my roaming video. When you have this set up it'll roam between them and the systems allow it 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. Managed 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 Unify 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 hands so to speak and push the clients over by sending a de-auth frame or a move frame to get it over 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 Wi-Fi soon and I put it one of those in wall HDs 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'll have to make 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 going to 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 you know by 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 hundred 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 because of the lockdowns etc but not to get too off topic there's not many people there is 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 hey right around 1000 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 time 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 it like I said before if you have some of those people who are uh 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'll 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 through AM not many people connected it does a scan 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're 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 there 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 is helpful take the time to read through the documentation for some of the details on when you're building out these systems but the unify actually the they themselves tell you is default and 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 LawrenceSystems.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.lorencsystems.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 right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time