Bad Cell Coverage? Use Wi-Fi Calling!

With may people than ever working from home bad cell coverage is a huge issue. The best way to get around bad cell coverage at your home is by having great Wi-Fi.

If you want to use Wi-Fi calling the most important thing is to have full coverage and good signal quality in and around your home. Wi-Fi calling does not need high throughput but it does require good quality of service so you calls are not dropped. You are not going to get this from your Internet service providers wireless router.

What you need is multiple Wi-Fi 6 access points like the Ruckus R550 or the Engenius ECW230 most homes will need 2 to 3 wired in to provide full coverage with great Wi-Fi.

The Ruckus cloud goes a step further and allows you to enable a Wi-Fi calling profile and apply it to a SSID.

This will give Wi-Fi calling traffic higher QOS priority so if someone is uploading a big file or gaming your call will not have reduced quality.

You can also pull analytics reports and see how much traffic is going over Wi-Fi calling and from which devices.

You can enable Wi-Fi calling on both IOS and Android devices. On the iPhone you go into the cellular setting menu and enable it. It will ask for your location for 911 emergency’s and that is it.

Click here for more information on the Ruckus R550 and EnGenius ECW230 https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=r550+cloud+or+ecw230

EnGenius Cloud Managed ECW260 Wi-Fi 6 Outdoor Access Point Range Testing

I did a quick outdoor range test of the ECW260 Wi-Fi 6 Access Point. I mounted mid way up a tree and connected to a ECS2512FP multi gigabit PoE switch I was able to link at 2.5Gb over 75 feet of cat5e.

At 20 feet away I was able to get over 400Mbps with my iPhone 12 Pro associated to the 5.8Ghz radio

Then at 200 Feet from the AP with line of sight I was able to get almost 100Mbps.

I can see from the cloud client timeline feature that my iPhone switched to the 2.4Ghz radio during the 200 foot test. Because of the terrain and buildings I was not able to test further but the ECW260 should be able to provide usable Wi-Fi at nearly twice this distance line of sight.

The ECW260 is available here https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=612

And the ECS2512FP multi gigabit PoE switch is here https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=48&products_id=597