I’m building a new home and wanted to know if the Vera3 can be connected to my modem as a wifi router on the first floor, and then a second Vera3 be connected via a hard wired ethernet connection on the second floor to provide seamless wifi coverage for the house, besides the zwave capabilities. Will this be a simply a plug and play setup, to act as one network, or will I need to do any configuring of the second Vera3 to get the wireless network to function smoothly?
Briancc,
That’s a pretty common setup. You just have to ensure that each access point (Vera3) has the same ESSID, the same password, and different channels (ideally at least 5 apart).
Whether you can force the Vera3’s channel to a specific number, and how good the Vera3’s Wifi range is, are the only bits I can’t answer for you.
Edit: Now that I’m on a real keyboard and not my phone, I can add some other advice.
You will probably get more reliable wireless if you get a dedicated wireless access point rather than use Vera’s Wifi radio. If you do that then you won’t lose wireless on your other devices when you inevitably have to reboot your Vera. Also you have the option of getting a 2.4 GHz/5 GHz dual-band Wifi access point (which Vera isn’t), reducing interference with neighbours and Bluetooth and microwave ovens and other 2.4 GHz devices. It’ll be an extra box upstairs using another 5-10 W of power, but you might be able to do without the upstairs Vera then, and just let Z-wave devices extend the mesh across your storeys.
Another thing to be aware of is if you need wireless repeaters to reach dead spots on your property. If all of your wireless access points are the same brand (mine are all Apple Airport, for example) then you can use WDS to extend your wireless network beyond the Ethernet wiring’s normal range. Vera probably won’t give you this, not without a great deal of experimentation.
It sort of depends on how critical you want Wifi to be in your house. Personally, if I were building a new home, I’d run Cat6 Ethernet cable everywhere and the hell with wireless.
Thanks for that info.
And you have to make sure their wifi interfaces are on the same IP subnet, and that only one of them is configured to be a DHCP server, or, if both, that the DHCP lease ranges don’t overlap.
You can allegedly configure all of those things on Vera3, but there’s some debate at the moment as to whether the wifi settings actually work properly right now.