I just got the Uniti Atom streamer and Uniti Core server to go into my living room. I have been instructed to pull a Cat 6 line from the router (in the den) to the living room, but the house is very contemporary (almost all sloped ceilings) and there are no attics to run through and there are sliding doors along the interior path. So, a pretty long outdoor route will need to be used and a hole drilled (and waterproofed) into the stucco where the cable would enter the LR.
I had an AT&T (Internet service provider) come look and he said AT&T won’t penetrate the exterior wall, I would need to hire a low-voltage cabling specialist. He did show me a fairly new eero Max 7 mesh system which supports 4.3 Gbps wireless speed. Would this be fast enough to avoid the need to pull to Cat 6 cable?
How far is the router from your living room? I’d be surprised if it didn’t work already. If not, the mesh system would be fine - plenty for streaming music.
It’s not so much about so called “speed”, but it’s protocol and signal connection quality… I would suggest 802.11n (wifi4) as an absolute minimum, but preferably 802.11ac (wifi 5 ) or later.. and ensure signal quality is good or excellent for your client. You should see this on your wifi router for a connected client.
If you use a mesh, you should ensure the signal quality for each chain in the mesh is at least good and preferably excellent as that will become the weakest link.
This is because there are many variables with wifi to provide effective throughput in the real world and it not really just about “speed” which sort of becomes meaningless and is equivalent to go faster stripes on a car…
Just to put the ‘speed’ issue into perspective, as long as you’re getting more than around 10Mbps you’ll be fine. Perhaps a little more for higher res streams and multiple client devices. So if your speed was into the thousands with a 4.3Gbps network you’d have far more capacity than you need.
Its nothing at all to do with speed, it’s a number of how much data is transferred in a second.
It refers to how wide the pipe is, not how fast the water is flowing.
And it has nothing to do with how far it can transmit a wireless (wifi) signal or it’s ability to penetrate walls.
It’s not a direct line of sight, but the router is about 25-27’ from the equipment in the living room. There is a very large opening (8’ wide x 6’-8” tall) so it sounds like the best approach will be to try it over the mesh network. Thanks for the quick responses!
The Core of course does not use WiFi. It can be plugged into the router - there is no need for it to be in the same room as the Atom. Or, if the mesh equipment has an ethernet port, it could be plugged into that.