I’d start with the basics having attempted to provide, as we all have, a broad base of shared knowledge and public domain points of reference available at the Wi-Fi Alliance website.
Start, as I would if doing this in a professional context with establishing the characteristics of the environment.
Building construction
Building constraints
Service entry point
Size and number of rooms to service
Access Point location and density
Service types and client density/concurrency
We’ve now been able to establish a number of additional points of reference in establishing how the Wi-Fi network might be setup physically and from there can determine how best to tune this for optimal performance.
Location is South Korea
Building is shared (apartment block)
Property is rented so doing extensive work to add fixed backhaul infrastructure (Ethernet/PoE) is not permitted or constrained
It would be useful for @Nestor_Burma to share with us the layout of the property in terms of floorplan if possible or at least room number, room dimensions and distance between Fibre termination equipment and ND555.
If you can let us know what Operating System your main computer is using I can suggest some Wi-Fi scanning tools that will allow you to see what AP’s are visible in your property and what the Channel utilisation currently looks like.
I use a Mac OS laptop (MacBook Pro) and an application called Wi-Fi Explorer for example to give me a quick snapshot of the RF environment and establish a number of points of data to quantify relative activity and channel utilisation amongst other things.
Once we have a clearer picture of the physical and RF environment that should help to refine the setup of any kit being added in to it.
Typically it’s best to let the equipment work out what is the most suitable channel width and frequency itself rather than forcing it to use a specific one manually as the conditions of the RF environment and your AP neighbours can change dynamically over time.
Specific to Wi-Fi 6 certified Access Points, they support a number of features that allow them to both utilise spectrum more efficiently as well as coexist with neighbouring Access Points with greater tolerance for error and jitter.
Allowing for the time zones and @Nestor_Burma availability we can review the site survey inputs as outlined above and guide with more refinement from there.
Basics first rules remaining, gathering environment parameters in the form of a site survey as outlined previously will allow you to determine the right equipment choice and their physical location relative to your Fibre service entry point to your property.
Your consideration to extend your Internet service over Wi-Fi and then to extend that over a wired Ethernet connection to your ND555 is probably not going to give you the best result as the extender/AP you would be connecting to your ND555 will likely have a basic switched mode power supply acting as a source of noise and will also be responsible for bridging the data between the Wi-Fi radio in the Extender and an Ethernet controller which your ND555 would then be wired to. This has the potential to create processing overheads and could add both noise and jitter, both of which are best avoided if possible.
If your physical environment allows it and the layout and building construction aren’t overly limiting then a single wired AP located correctly with your ND555 using its internal Wi-Fi radio should give you the best connection without creating any cabling or equipment constraints based on your limitations as a rental tenant.
If you can it would be preferable to have a separate Access Point for Wi-Fi with it’s own embedded network controller that then connects to your router/Fibre ONT that does not have a Wi-Fi radio or if it does have one, that it is disabled.
I’m also assuming that the Fibre connection coming in to your property terminates the optical connection and presents either a single or multiple Ethernet RJ-45 jacks for the subscriber (meaning you) to connect their own equipment to.
If you can confirm the type/model of your Optical Network Termination (ONT) equipment that would be helpful to determine the best equipment to put between the Fibre network, your own wired network and in parallel your Wi-Fi network.
I’m unsure who your service provider is but if it’s SKB then it’s possible we (the company I work for) supplied the optical equipment so that may help!
Your Fibre equipment could be configured in a number of ways, namely either acting as a Bridge/Modem or acting as a router. The connection type will help to determine the best choice of equipment to put between the Fibre ONT and your own private wired and Wi-Fi networks.
Hi there,
So I took the opportunity this morning, since I’m on my own in the house, to redesign the layout. Initially all the modem/ router was in the master bedroom, and I moved it into a corner of the living room from where I can have an ethernet cable from the router into the nd, so this is fine. I will later deal with the TV in the master bedroom and its hd tv box as well as the apple tv with netflix. For now I focus on getting the optimal setup for the nd555 in the living room.
BUT I now have an unforeseen issue. Normally I have 2 home networks that I can see and connect to from my iphone : the 2G and the 5G such named. So far my nd was connected wirelessly to the 5g. But now when I try to reconnect wirelessly the nd screen shows me only the 2G network…! I have tried for the last hour but no way to get the 5g in the list from the nd screen ( yet I can see it on my iphone)… any inputs here while I try to figure this out?
Ok so now I have the good connection after having connected the nd555 not to the lan output of the fiber modem but instead to the lan of the wifi router ( which is connected by ethernet to the same fiber modem). Naively I thought it would be better to have the nd connected at the source (the fiber modem) rather than through the downstream wifi router…but obviously I was wrong (why?) anyway what is important is that IT SOUNDS RIGHT NOW!!!
Still catching up on what you’ve done.
Sounds like you’ve ended up just hard wiring your ND to your network?
If it’s of interest KT already offer a Wi-Fi 6 capable router.
Hi Mr M, yes. Still do you know why I have to connect the nd555 to the wifi router and not to the fiber modem ( it also works but I cannot control through wifi)?
Thanks I will also look to upgrade this wifi router!
Nestor
It’s important here to make a distinction between a Modem and a Router.
Your Modem will be the physical link between the Fibre network and your home private network. Fibre Optical cable comes in from KT to your Modem and outputs electrical Ethernet on an RJ-45 Jack connector.
If you connect a device directly to the Modem it will provide a Bridged connection to the KT network and provide a single IP address.
If you then need to connect more devices it cannot support that as it isn’t routing any IP traffic and translating the single IP address on your Modem to a range of private IP addresses. To support more than one client device requires a router in between.
The Router can also be a Wi-Fi Access Point as it seems is the case in your setup.
The router will be supporting a number of services including DHCP to allocate your devices an IP address, NAT to handle Network Address translation as it routes your private subnet of IP addresses to your KT modem IP address, and so forth.
So you require the second Router device to be able to support not just Wi-Fi but ability to address and route traffic to more than one client device.
This explains why the device you connected to the modem, the ND, seemed to work but as it was then using the single bridged IP address, nothing else including your phone/remote could be on the same subnet.
Thank you! Very clear, I understand now. I think what misled me was that the modem also had 4 lan ports…so are they useless in fact?
Also another question Is that once I’m ethernet connected…then I cannot see on the nd which of my 2 networks I’m connected to, the 2G or the 5g, it just say “ethernet connected”? Or doesn’t this matter when an ethernet connection is established, maybe there is the only “one” network?
In any event now that I have a good Ethernet connection to the nd555, I Immediately feel very odd to have such a cheap Plastic box as this “router” as “the source” when the rest of the system It is now attached to is made of heavy crafted metal boxes with such a perfectionist attention to every detail… I feel there must be a lot of ways to optimize that signal especially probably decoupling from internal vibrations and also probably some better Power converter lpsu. …?
I had hoped you’d stick to a Wi-Fi connection to your ND!
My advice is leave the KT Fibre kit as it is, if you want to change the Wi-Fi Access Point or use a different switch you have those options but be prepared to spend a lot of time and probably money evaluating the plethora or choices out there.
There are other very extensive threads on this forum discussing Ethernet Switches and Ethernet cables, there is no conclusive answer to be found there, just to warn you in advance.
Yes my intention is still to get a wifi 6 router to manage all the traffic more efficiently, in particular all the laptop and tv connections. Now the one you listed from kt seems very powerful, they say for 200 persons, I need to see if this is the best fit to my needs…
Hi there,
Since I have more time now to listen to music with the work from home policy, I have looked into upgrading my router anyway to get the wifi6 since the surcharge by KT is minimal. Unfortunately the router you shared with me, which is the only wifi6 they have at the moment cannot be installed in my home since they say it goes together with a 10GB/s access which I do not have. So I’m still upgrading to the next level router (twice as fast…for +1 $/month which is ok):
You’re certainly spoilt over there in SK for connectivity options if nothing else!
If they are coming in to Install it then have a talk to them about placement, ideally you want it to be central in the property if it’s your only Access Point and ideally as high up as possible as most of the physical obstacles are below waist height, small considerations but it does help with getting the best out of the equipment.
The fact that it has external antennas is also beneficial as well as having 4 instead of 2 to give increased throughput, not necessarily an issue for your Hi-Fi but for other devices like TV’s or when watching say 4K which has much higher bandwidth requirements than listening to music it makes sure you have sufficient bandwidth available to support those higher bandwidth services and to support concurrency as well as you connect from multiple devices and do things in parallel.
Good luck with the changes and do report back on how it all goes.
Other than Ethernet should be able to provide the most consistent streaming performance.
Wi-fi really needs to support WMM along with the streamer to have any way of approaching Ethernet type frame timing consistency performance guarantees, and consumer Wi-fi equipment just doesn’t seem to support this (whether it be so called Wi-fi 5/6/7) … it’s all pretty much much fire and forget…
I think it’s fair to say that, on this forum at least, IP networking is a topic that many find confusing, overwhelming and difficult to find simple solutions for.
Be it Wi-Fi or wired, compared to say a CD player or a turntable the breadth of information and individuals findings is extensive yet ultimately inconclusive for many.
Yes I can see that… but I guess one can understand generally if you are going to do a job, it’s best done properly, and you should use the right tool for the job… I guess you don’t need to understand the details to appreciate that.
Short cuts and kludges are hardly going to provide reliable and consistent results on expensive quality audio equipment.
One wouldn’t power their Naim using a temporary garden mains extension lead… so why do some approach the data network in a similar way.
You mean those orange ones on a reel you power a lawn mower from?
It’s a lot more open to interpretation than things like speaker cables or Interconnects or equipment racks or mains cables. All of those things sit within the bounds of what most Hi-Fi equipment dealers can give reasonably solid advice on, usually from their own ears/hands.
I can’t recall an occasion when any Hi-Fi shop has given me advice on networking that made any real sense apart from them mapping it to a Hi-Fi paradigm and using language they could relate to like “smoothing” “more analogue” “richer” and so on.
Most of what you or I could comment on here is way beyond what most non technical folks could ever expect to wrap their heads around and most probably would never want to or feel a desire to. You can simplify things down to a certain point but beyond that it’ll be down to an individuals appetite to either try different things or learn more to make improvements in other ways.
I’m lucky enough to get free kit from work to try/break/modify which helps.
