Introduction#
I’ve come to really fall in love with this nice whiskey bar in my neighborhood, and apparently so have others with it winning “Best Bar!” for two years in a row. It wasn’t hard to see why with how much they ingrained themselves into the community, their careful attention to detail in service, an extremely cozy atmosphere, and being in such a great spot to walk to in the heart of the neighborhood. There really was just one thing that stunk about the experience: the WiFi.
I know, I know. I should be having a good time talking to my friends there with me and catching up with the neighbors, but there’s a couple things I can put forth in my defense. Their very, very long whiskey list was originally only available on their website, with a handy QR code to make it easy to directly visit it. Plus once a month, they break out the “Ripple Machine” to print your own images right onto the foam of a pint of Guinness. Both of these need web access for your own device, and with the neighborhood’s extremely poor cellular coverage, this meant that you were going to struggle to participate.
It turns out, if you confidently spew out a long list of solutions to a problem to someone that had already been frustrated in all their attempts to fix the problem, they’re inclined to make it your problem. And that they did. After another beer, a little chat, and a handshake-I was hired to fix the WiFi at their bar.
The Situation#
It’s hard to understate just how small this bar space is. With that, it’s completely forgivable for someone to assume that all of their ISP-provided equipment would be enough to meet their needs. The reality is, it might have actually been enough for the day-to-day if it was configured correctly. I would have to revisit the physical placement of their Wireless Access Point as well as the internet gateway configuration. There was also some Point-of-Sale and security equipment that was directly connected via network cable, so that would need to remain available. Finally, there were plans in the future for them to be hosting events out into the neighborhood. With the poor cellular reception, they wanted to be able to set up their own access points in the street so they would have great coverage-no matter how far down the block they were working.
The Solution#
That Internet Gateway…#
They are on an AT&T Business Fiber plan. There was no shortage of bandwidth for their needs with a Gigabit of service available. As they prefer you to do for most installations, AT&T had provided them with one of their standard Internet Gateways. These are ok at best, but I’m really not sure who these are truly configured for. At a draw for #1 issue is they have a default limit of only 5 guest network devices, which fueled the merry-go-round issue of guests being rejected by the access point and not being able to reconnect if their signal quality dropped low enough to kick them. The other problem at a draw was the placement of the internet gateway, which apparently was on the ground, in the farthest corner of the bar, directly behind a large, steel dishwasher. The signal quality from that placement was dismal.
I could have just relocated the internet gateway, overrode the guest limit parameters, and sent them on their way, but I knew that wouldn’t solve their neighborhood events problem. Instead, I kept it where it was, but installed it up onto a decent wall mount since all of the cables already terminated there. I also disabled the internal WiFi networks for it entirely, as we wouldn’t be needing those any longer and put the device into bypass mode to let something else handle the routing. I had something much better in mind.
UniFi Networks#
A friend in networking had convinced me years prior to try out UniFi gear. “Easy to set up. Easy to manage. Still remarkably capable.” It was a review I’d heard repeated often and had decided to give a try to it. I’d started off with a pair of AC Pro access points and a controller running on a RaspberryPi 3. I’ve since upgraded to a more robust (but still self-hosted) controller on a virtual machine in Proxmox and the U6 Pro access points for my own home. I was fully convinced of how capable these devices were and I had a lot of the hardware now kicking around from other projects and upgrades, so it’s always easy for me to recommend when I can tell them that I like it so much I already have the hardware they need to get started in-hand.
I started them with a Cloud Gateway Ultra for their controller, routing, and switching solution. This little device was not only capable as basically a no-nonsense solution, but was also very affordable. It only took a few minutes to set it up behind the AT&T gateway and setup an owner account for the bar and add my own account as one of the administrators to support the rest of the setup. Some quick firewall configuration made for some important isolation of the point-of-sale devices, from the employee & entertainment devices, and the guest devices. Once I verified we had all of that setup and working as expected, it was time to get the actual wireless up and going.
The Wireless Access Points#
Despite their age, it’s hard to argue with how well an AC Pro still works today. I had half a dozen of these still around that were pulled down from upgrades and with their lack of need or interest in the extra speed of WiFi 6 & 7, they loved the idea of $free.99 for their cost. I’d normally caution against putting older hardware into a working business solution, but these are probably UniFi’s most popular device and they continue to maintain active support of them today. We only had to drill one small hole in the back of the bar and I was able to run a cable up behind their shelf to a nice perch for the access point. With a simple termination of that cable, this access point was plugged in and provisioned to the network without any issue. The main network and guest network appeared right away and I got to work with testing out the coverage an connection quality. Really, there wasn’t a bad spot in the house.
It just took a few minutes to go through with one of the owners and help them reset the WiFi connection on the devices throughout the bar. Everything seemed to connect just fine and the coverage even extended pretty nicely into the patio out front. I then got to unveil the bonus surprise to them of their new guest WiFi login page, which I had setup using one of the particularly lovely high resolution photos I’d found on their website. This also gave a best-practice disclaimer about acceptable use of their network. At this point, the main job was complete and they were very pleased with the results. Payment hadn’t really been discussed beyond reimbursement of materials and I wasn’t actually expecting anything (I just really wanted to watch stupid videos and be able to print memes onto my beer while hanging out there), but was pleasantly surprised by a sizeable gift certificate to use there. Nice!
Event Expansion#
Wait, what about the events? This one was set to happen a little later after the initial network install. I gave them specifications for what I needed for a junction box outside to wire in the connection they needed. An electrician was already on the schedule to come out and install a high-current exterior receptacle to support refrigerator trailers and other equipment for those outside events, so the junction box I needed was added to the job list. All of it was being installed in the same corner of the building, so it was a relatively small add-on. Word came back to me a few weeks later that it was installed, so it was time for me to come back and run a CAT6A network cable from the UCG Ultra to the new junction box. This was complicated by having to go spelunking behind that dishwasher to feed the cable through (I wish I had photos of myself wedged between the bar and that dishwasher with my feet in the air), but was uneventful afterward. The port punched down nicely and everything labeled to show the cable structure.
Connecting up an additional access point, it provisioned quickly and I setup some profiles to make it easy to switch things over to “event mode.” Only the main WiFi network extends into the street (by design), and I put down a bandwidth cap on both each guest device and how much bandwidth the guest network is permitted to consume as a whole. So far, there’s been two events with this setup and it’s gone great every time. There’s a third upcoming that aims to be much larger than the others, which may see me deploying a USW Flex Mini outside and setting up 2 or 3 access points. I’ll probably make a shorter blog post when that event happens to cover how it was deployed.
