Sorry, this post got long. TLDR in bold.
I'm helping a friend with apartment in multi unit, multi floor building.
His unit is 1600 sq ft, one floor
The existing old wifi is not performing well.
The goal is to understand the existing wifi environment including neighbor APs, channels used, signal strength, band utilization (2.4, 5, and 6), channel utilization. Then, ultimately recommend a solution.
I don't have any data yet.
I found these posts helpful for baseline information.
What I'd like to do for diagnostics is deploy multiple OpenWRT routers in the unit as sensors.
Maybe something like RT3200 w/ OpenWRT replaces existing router and provide remote access, 3 ASUS onhub w/ OpenWRT connected by wire for monitoring sensors.
Using those devices since they are available.
I'm leaning toward Kismet on OpenWRT for diagnostics since it has a multi sensor architecture.
Looking for alternatives, feedback and advice.
comments and questions:
#1 Doing a site survey with a phone or laptop gives a good starting picture. However, it is only a snapshot in time and maybe you miss the worst case scenario. That is why I want to do a long duration site survey maybe a week or two.
#2 Can I get channel utilization from Kismet? One of the mentioned posts links to an ARS article where they mention that Ubiquiti and InSSIDer can report on utilization. Seems to me just seeing an AP beaconing on a given channel is inadequate information. If it doesn't have any utilization I wouldn't expect it to impact me.
#3 Is using a router as a site sensor a bad idea vs using a laptop or phone? Could it be that having bigger better antenna will give a higher signal of your and your neighbor's APs and therefore not represent the end use case of phones and laptops.
#4 For heatmap diagrams on congestion, do you need one for every channel? Usually I see heatmaps used for design. Put some APs on a drawing and simulate the coverage. Neighbor APs typically don't seem to be included. In that case the theoretical heat map is the same for every channel in 5GHz, so you don't care. I want to see a heatmap for existing congestion. I guess that means a heatmap for every channel.
#5 Can low dBm neighbor devices impact your performance? If your client sees another SSID/device on the same channel and it has high utilization but something like -90dBm would it still impact your performance.
#6 Any good ideas on post processing the data? Maybe I will load into Graylog or Elastic.
#7 The software that does all the things is probably thousands of dollars. I'm will to go a few hundred if there is something that provides a good benefit.
#8 I haven't seen anything free/cheap that ticks all the boxes. Intuitibits has an analyzer that will allow remote capture from a wlanpi. I also got this to work on an Ubuntu sensor. Haven't tried Netspot yet, but looks like it might help. They have a feature for combining multiple saved captures. These tool seem to just capture pcaps of 802.11 management frames with tcpdump.
