Home WiFi Preferred Equipment in 2022?

Continuing the discussion from Wireless Router Network:

Wondering if Ubiquiti is still the go-to 3+ years later, and if @coloneldan remains happy with this setup…

I’m reasonably satisfied with the single Unifi 6 Lite I installed recently. As attic temps drop down to sub-sweltering I’ll run the cables to the master bedroom and install the other AP I’ve procured and see if things switch off between them - something that did not happen with the ISP-provided mesh extender I was using previously.

A minor downside is that I’ve yet to connect at better than 400Mb link rate. This has proven to be an academic concern at best since none of my wireless devices demand much more than the nominal ~25Mb that a 4K stream demands.

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I’m really happy with my Eero. I have three 3 Pro’s on two floors, and the blind spots I had previously are completely gone. Simple to install and configure, no maintenance to speak of, and it’s robust enough to control my entire network.

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I’ll throw my hat behind the Unifi infrastructure as well. They are one of the few lower cost quality platforms out there right now that isn’t direct lining back to Amazon or Google. I know this isn’t a concern for all, I’m just starting to hit failure points due to the layering of services which all seem to back bone from Amazon and Google. Plus, we need competition to hopefully keep varied option on the market. Unifi has a full offering of Wifi Connected gadgets like door bell cameras, ect. with the ability to cloud host or personal host the data storage and sharing as well.

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I’m happy with my Unify network, however, not so much with my internet provider: Frontier. The Frontier Fiber is 100/100. The network I installed is a five Unify UAP-AC-LR network. They are meshed together. The system manages the mesh automatically, (I didn’t configure it manually).
It works very well.

There are 34 clients on the mesh such as Amazon Fire tablets, Amazon Firesticks and Amazon Echo’s running media streams most of the time. I also have a plethora of home automation installed. The network traffic for these devices is minimal though. The clients are automatically load balanced based upon location and network performance. If I roam with my iPhone from the study,where I have a UAP, to the garage where I have another UAP the connection automatically switches to the garage router.

I have NEST for my climate control and CO detection. I have RING for video security and a Konnected controller for my wired security. All are connected to a Hubitat server and it displays a web based dashboard on two FireTablets mounted near my two primary doors. It is also accessible while away from home via a cloud based server hosted by Hubitat. This gives me complete control of all of the network attached devices.

Lastly, we have a Shark robot for vacuuming. It, too, is connected to the network. You can watch it as it progresses through the mesh network cleaning different rooms.

Everything can be voice controlled with Alexa, too. We routinely turn lights on an off. set security alarms and tune and turn the TV off and on with Alexa. I have my TV wired to my Yamaha receiver which is also on the network and can be controlled from my phone. I can play media from multiple devices via the Yahama all done wirelessly.

I have occasionally had a slow internet connection, but it is not attributable to the meshed network.
I’ve had outages, too, sometimes requiring me to reboot the connection in the garage, which I can do remotely via a wireless connected TPLINK plug switch.

I also have a RPI pi-hole installed. It affords a pretty nice barrier to unwanted advertisements and other spam type traffic. For the few dollars I’ve invested it is a nice little server. It will function as a simple firewall, but I have not configured it to do so.

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/openvpn/firewall/

I’ve wired my second home in Houston with cameras and security similar to my home. My wife keeps a pretty close eye on everything there with this setup. There is no Unify network there.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the way things work as long as I have power, of course. :wink:

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I’d still go for ubiquiti as well. I’ve got a pair of APs and the hand off is nearly seamless and management is pretty easy, just like managing one ap.

My only other experience is a handful of consumer routers with either stock firmware or dd-wrt, so I have no idea how it compares to other prosumer-esque solutions, if any exist.

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I still agree that for Wi-Fi unifi is still king for prosumer level stuff.

The kind of funny thing is that all their APs, from what I’ve tested, are just running a slightly custom fork of openwrt… So if you like playing around, you can make them do some really cool things.

I do personally recommend that you do not use any of their cloud based features tho

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because…?

While I can’t speak for jsnowfreedman, from what I’ve informally gathered there’s been an exodus of engineering talent at Ubiquiti that’s left the value added reseller / freelancer small office IT guy demographic in the lurch.

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I run a Unify network with the Dream router and two additional access points. Great WIFI throughout the house, I am a night owl so I have been caught by the late night auto-update a few times but that is a minor gripe.

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They’re hardware/device software is fairly good. Their cloud security / application security leaves a little bit to be desired.

And yeah, a fair bit of the engineering is kind of gotten a little annoyed at the company.

There are new products of theirs, like the unifi-based switches and routers, which are kind of terrible / overly limited for their price imo… I used to love them because for the cost you got a really nice prosumer router / access point if you knew what you wanted/how to do what you wanted, but now it’s become more of a consumer let’s idiot-proof mentality it seems (which is fine, but not what I’ve needed)

9 times out of 10 I still go for ubiquity for WiFi/AP stuff tho, because they’re better than most of the alternatives still.

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What’re folks using for wired stuffs?
e.g.

  • Permanent cabling Cat 6 (since the spool of cat5e is all but exhausted)
  • Jumpers whatever’s handy since I don’t expect gigabit throughput anytime soon, Cat5e is Good Enough™ (and they’re pretty short)

So far I’ve done nothing in the attic or seriously dropped down walls.

Attic runs are … TBD. I’d love to install conduit and leave a pull string in situ for any future pulls, but might also just run it along the insulation and hope that my data cables are no more interesting to vermin than the alarm and HVAC control cables.

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Ubiquiti edge* series are great for wired. The unifi side of the wires stuff is meh. The EdgeRouter-X is a mediocre router that can get full duplex half gig, but is really nice for like VPN systems or BGP behind another more powerful device. EdgeRouter-6P is a fantastic little prosumer router tho.

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