I'm the solo IT support person for an SMB operating from a converted two-story house. We have roughly 70–80 employees and around 90–100 wireless devices during busy periods, including laptops, phones, and printers. The network uses a Huawei fiber modem in DMZ mode, a MikroTik RB450Gx4 for routing, firewall, DHCP, and bandwidth queues, and an unmanaged 24-port Gigabit switch. Six TP-Link Deco BE25 and X50 units are currently active as wired access points, with all Ethernet backhaul connections coming from the switch. Four APs are on the first floor and two are upstairs; I disabled another downstairs AP to reduce interference. Two livestreaming PCs are wired through a Deco node and remain completely stable. The main problem is concentrated on the first floor and almost entirely affects 2.4GHz clients. Those devices disconnect, fail to authenticate, or see latency spikes above 2,000ms, while clients that successfully connect to 5GHz remain stable. Devices also tend to stick to 2.4GHz even when 5GHz is available. The network works normally when the office is quiet, and wired clients have consistent latency and full bandwidth, so the router and ISP connection appear healthy. I have tried disabling 2.4GHz and separating the bands into different SSIDs, but some devices still have trouble connecting. The Deco system also offers limited per-AP channel control, so multiple nearby APs may be sharing the same channel and competing for airtime. Are there any worthwhile configuration changes or temporary workarounds, or has this hardware reached its practical limit? How would you explain the difference between an airtime/capacity problem and an Internet-speed problem to management? Finally, would a business AP system such as TP-Link Omada or UniFi be a sensible replacement, and how many APs would be a reasonable starting point for this building?
6 Answers
This is probably an airtime and radio-density problem, not a 500 Mbps Internet problem. Seven consumer mesh nodes in a relatively small house can create more contention than coverage benefit, especially if several radios are forced onto the same channel. A proper wireless survey should determine AP placement, channel reuse, transmit power, and channel width. You may actually need fewer, better-placed APs rather than simply adding more.
The quickest test is to disable 2.4GHz for a full workday, or at least move it to a separate SSID with a different password. Keep the main SSID on 5GHz so capable devices do not keep choosing the congested band. Before doing that, make sure the laptops and other essential devices really support 5GHz, and identify anything that genuinely requires 2.4GHz. Also run a channel-utilization scan rather than relying only on signal strength. A clear channel on one AP may still be overloaded when several nearby APs reuse it.
A temporary workaround is to publish a 5GHz-only primary SSID and a separate, less-promoted 2.4GHz SSID for legacy devices. Do not expect band steering to rescue clients that make poor roaming decisions—steering is advisory, and the client ultimately chooses the band. If 5GHz-only clients still disconnect, capture AP logs and check channel utilization, authentication failures, DHCP behavior, and whether the Deco nodes are rebooting or losing uplink connectivity. That would help distinguish radio contention from a firmware or switching problem.
Replacing the Decos with Omada or UniFi is a reasonable next step, but design the wireless system from a floor plan and survey instead of buying a fixed number of APs. Start with a few properly placed business APs—possibly two to four for the building depending on wall construction and required capacity—and add only if measurements show a coverage or capacity gap. Use 20 MHz channels on 2.4GHz, keep that band for devices that need it, avoid excessive transmit power, and use a wired switch with VLAN support if you want separate employee, guest, printer, and IoT networks. The existing MikroTik can generally remain as the router if it is stable and has enough capacity; replacing the firewall is not automatically necessary.
For management, I would explain that the Internet connection is the size of the highway to the building, while Wi‑Fi airtime is the number of lanes inside the building. The speed test can look fine when the building is empty, but dozens of devices still have to share a limited number of radio transmission opportunities. Adding bandwidth will not solve collisions, interference, weak roaming behavior, or overloaded radios. A business AP platform gives you per-AP channel and power control, client statistics, VLAN support, better roaming features, and visibility into the actual cause of failures.
Separate employee devices from guest and personal devices if possible. Put guests, phones, and other unmanaged equipment on an isolated network with appropriate bandwidth limits, and keep printers and business systems segmented as well. A single large broadcast domain makes troubleshooting harder, although segmentation alone will not fix overloaded 2.4GHz airtime. Also verify that updates, cloud sync, video streaming, and similar traffic are not consuming the available airtime or queue capacity.
All of the APs already have wired backhaul, but the system does not let me tune channels independently very well. Several nearby nodes appear to be sharing the same channel, which is one of the main reasons I’m looking at a controller-based system.