The Vera units provide pretty good WiFi. We were getting by with two (one V1 and one V2) and a couple WAPs at the corners of the house. Not ideal, and got to spend some time every week kickstarting the WAPs, mucking with the WPA keys, etc. And still didn’t have coverage more than a few feet outside the house.
Bought a refurb Cisco WAP-N, which was a nightmare. It was somehow mangling the DHCP requests and responses if it was in WPA mode, just for iOS clients. I’d seen this problem at work for a long time, but that had gotten cleaned up, so I follishly expected the latest/greatest firmware to fix it. No such luck. The Cisco forums are full of folks griping about this, and the general flakiness of the 610N. Recommendation was to go to a mucm more expensive Cisco unit to solve the problem.
Did some searching, and a lot of folks really like the Ubiquiti Unifi WAPs for commercial or semi-commerical setups. Got one and tried it. Liked it. Got two of the long-range units and put them at opposite corners of the house, and the short-range upstairs to cover the second floor. We now have solid 100% signal across our entire lot–14K sq ft, triangular. Manage the WAPs in concert through a simple control app, that I have running on a Mac Pro, but they have the config app for Windows as well. The things support VLAN, guest networks, roaming, etc. The WAPs present a single, unified SSID. Adding the last two units took me longer to mount them (easy) than it did to set them up.
Highly recommended. We’re lucky, in that we were able to get our house mostly post-wired with CAT6, but you can also run these things as repeaters with no hard-wire feed. Power is POE, but they come with an injector. The short-range unit cost me $69 plus shipping, the LRs were about $99. We’re still running the radios on the Veras, to serve the odd B/G client in the house, like the Foscam, Kindles–so they don’t drag the Unifis down to B/G from N.
Apologies for the off-topic. But this community has pointed me at so many helpful products and ideas, I thought I could give a bit back here. These WAPs rock, and are pretty cheap.
–Richard