I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.

And they don't look fugly.

It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.

▲

walrus01 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

TBH if I wanted a bunch of closed source 802.11ac (2017 era) AP purchased on eBay, I would go for Unifi stuff far before Cisco. There's a plethora of it available from decommissioned sites.

▲

cduzz 17 hours ago | parent [-]

I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?

Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.

And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.

I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).

If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...

▲

murphyslaw 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.

▲

vdm 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ruckus Unleashed works the same way and plenty of them on ebay. TIL, thank you

	▲	cduzz 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system. I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...

▲

burner420042 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Documentation for how to set these up without the cisco control platform being present is hard to come by.

You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.

▲

cduzz a day ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.

That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...

Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.

It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.

Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.

	▲	Rediscover 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		About the Nintendo Switch 2: Maybe try perusing https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/sol... Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
	▲	burner420042 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't know why I've never tried just doing it the Cisco way. Thank you for the walk-through.
	▲	vdm 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		LLMs are great at checking logs and tweaking these clis in a logged in ssh tmux pane