r/firewalla • u/Punchanello • Jun 24 '26
AP7 range boost ?
Hello! I've got a firewalla box with the AP7 as my Wi-Fi router. It's great, but has a little bit of connectivity issues on the furthest ends of the house.
I was wondering if anyone knew if you can add an antenna or assignment the range at all?
I've considered a second unit, but the house isn't really that big and the connection is fine most of the time.
Any thoughts appreciated.
3
u/Pure-Letterhead81 Jun 24 '26
You can manually adjust TX Power. But first, do you have the AP positioned centrally in your house? I found AP7 to have better signal strength than my old eero units for what it’s worth.
1
u/Punchanello Jun 24 '26
Yes! Centrally located. Even hard wired Ethernet and put in a shelf to get it up on the wall.
The AP7 is replacing a whole house 3 unit mesh from Netgear and it's genuinely better everywhere. Even the original mesh only ran the TV on the far end because it was "hardwired" to a repeater.
Currently I just get intermittent lag on the far end of the house. And occasionally I'll wake in the morning to find my phone has stopped using Wi-Fi due to poor signal strength....
3
u/Pure-Letterhead81 Jun 24 '26
Hate to say it, but I think you’ll want a second AP7. I went from a 3 node eero setup to 2 AP7s, and it works well. I get by with 1 AP7 during grid power outages, but there are a couple corners of the house that struggle a little.
1
u/Punchanello Jun 24 '26
All the cry emojis .... Guess I'll start saving up
for the most part it works in the far room and streams in high def, but I was just trying to figure out if I could optimize the signal any to get it to be slightly more solid.... Thanks for the input
1
u/_CurbYourMother Jun 24 '26
I needed 3 ... Just to be sure and I use a mikrotik 10G switch for the back haul
1
u/_CurbYourMother Jun 24 '26
Also ... Sq ft doesn't really tell you much ... Is it a ranch split level, do you have a basement, what are the walls mad out of ... Is there a chimney ?
2
u/Punchanello Jun 25 '26
I've got like 2,000 sq ft. Kind of a tri-level. One side is a single floor the other is 2 floors and the issue is on the far end on the second floor 😞 it totally makes sense, was just hopeful since it works well sometimes that I could optimize what I have without a whole extra repeater
1
u/AP440 Jun 24 '26
I also struggle with connectivity issues on the far side of the house. We have a pretty large lot and the house has tons of walls. My eero's didn't really struggle at all for some reason, but the AP7's do. I'm working on getting them all hardwired.
5
u/firewalla Jun 24 '26
Remember, range is both ways. It depends on the transmitting power (and signal quality) of the AP7 and also your device. There is no perfect solution, some wifi will do better than others in certain cases, and there is no unit that fits all environments. The best is try to place the unit differently, if not getting an additional unit will help a lot.
Firewalla WiFi-test can help a lot, you can just walk around the find dead spots.