Mesh router recommendations

[Nycturne]

I’ve been on UniFi stuff for the last few years, no complaints. But I also have a simpler setup. House got wired for Ethernet when we moved in, and I added a small 20U rack into the spare bedroom closet that handles the network stuff. So UDM, backbone switch with PoE, and the servers. Access Points get power and backhaul from Ethernet. Even though the EVSE is outside, it gets enough coverage to upload reports through the outer walls and garage.

Can’t help you with how well their wireless mesh stuff works, but good luck with it.

 

[Cmaier]

I’ve been on UniFi stuff for the last few years, no complaints. But I also have a simpler setup. House got wired for Ethernet when we moved in, and I added a small 20U rack into the spare bedroom closet that handles the network stuff. So UDM, backbone switch with PoE, and the servers. Access Points get power and backhaul from Ethernet. Even though the EVSE is outside, it gets enough coverage to upload reports through the outer walls and garage.

Can’t help you with how well their wireless mesh stuff works, but good luck with it.

well, some unifi equipment arrives today and I’ll give it a shot.

 

[Cmaier]

Well, I received the gear. Gotta say, build quality feels excellent, and their packaging…they rival Apple.

Unfortunately, my daughter needs to use the internet, so I won’t be able to play with this stuff until later this afternoon, at the earliest.

 

[Cmaier]

Well, I switched my whole network over, with one fewer mesh point than the synology setup, and it all seems to be working. Only issue is the unifi device bridge didn’t work in the garage - it looks like it can’t get any signal there. So I’m stuck with a powerline bridge still. (I know unifi has some more powerful point-to-point bridges, but I’m not going to mess with them.)

I also see the travel router got back in stock (it was out last week) so I ordered one. I used to use Amplifi’s travel router when I used Amplifi equipment (amplifi is ubiquiti’s “consumer” line), with mixed success. My goal is to be able to transfer photos off my camera to my home NAS while traveling, without having to mess with setting up a vpn server, etc, so we’ll see how that all works too.

 

[diamond.g]

Well, I switched my whole network over, with one fewer mesh point than the synology setup, and it all seems to be working. Only issue is the unifi device bridge didn’t work in the garage - it looks like it can’t get any signal there. So I’m stuck with a powerline bridge still. (I know unifi has some more powerful point-to-point bridges, but I’m not going to mess with them.)

I also see the travel router got back in stock (it was out last week) so I ordered one. I used to use Amplifi’s travel router when I used Amplifi equipment (amplifi is ubiquiti’s “consumer” line), with mixed success. My goal is to be able to transfer photos off my camera to my home NAS while traveling, without having to mess with setting up a vpn server, etc, so we’ll see how that all works too.

Careful, now you are going to get interested in their camera system, and end up splurging....


EDIT: I usually tell folks to get UDR7 and U7-Lite, I think they sell their POE injectors for a cheap enough price to go with the U7's. Their camera's is where you can can mess up and drop serous money. They even have a ESVE you can add to the network.

 

[Cmaier]

Careful, now you are going to get interested in their camera system, and end up splurging....


EDIT: I usually tell folks to get UDR7 and U7-Lite, I think they sell their POE injectors for a cheap enough price to go with the U7's. Their camera's is where you can can mess up and drop serous money. They even have a ESVE you can add to the network.

Yeah, U7-lites really don’t make much sense for me, since I am not going to ceiling mount anything, and I need ethernet ports in at least a couple of my access points.

I love the topology graph with the little images of the actual client devices. Fun.

 

[Eric]

I’ve been on UniFi stuff for the last few years, no complaints. But I also have a simpler setup. House got wired for Ethernet when we moved in, and I added a small 20U rack into the spare bedroom closet that handles the network stuff. So UDM, backbone switch with PoE, and the servers. Access Points get power and backhaul from Ethernet. Even though the EVSE is outside, it gets enough coverage to upload reports through the outer walls and garage.

Can’t help you with how well their wireless mesh stuff works, but good luck with it.

We have TP Link mesh which works pretty well most of our wireless devices but I'm also hard wired for both my laptop and my Mac Studio, where I need the extra speed. Even with today's advancements being wired is infinitely faster.

 

[Nycturne]

I also see the travel router got back in stock (it was out last week) so I ordered one. I used to use Amplifi’s travel router when I used Amplifi equipment (amplifi is ubiquiti’s “consumer” line), with mixed success. My goal is to be able to transfer photos off my camera to my home NAS while traveling, without having to mess with setting up a vpn server, etc, so we’ll see how that all works too.

I tried one of these while we were traveling in Japan. But the fact that we had to use it in places where it had to bridge two wireless networks made it noticeably slower than just giving my partner a VPN config to put on her phone to get access to the home photo server/etc. Same result with a different, well-liked, brand of travel router as well.

I expect it to be much better in cases where Ethernet is available, and it also seemed to work fine when using it with cellular WAN over USB.

We have TP Link mesh which works pretty well most of our wireless devices but I'm also hard wired for both my laptop and my Mac Studio, where I need the extra speed. Even with today's advancements being wired is infinitely faster.

Yup, that's the reason we wired the house when we bought it. Cost less than it took to upgrade the Zinsco panel, so we didn't mind. Turned into a huge boon when the pandemic hit and we had to work from home. Spare bedroom with ethernet ports was suddenly a home office with 1Gbps symmetric to the corporate network.

Wireless interference and the "only one device can talk at a time" really kills the total throughput possible, IME.

 

[diamond.g]

This is what my UI network currently looks like. Later this summer I'll probably try switching to fiber, I am pretty sure I can just run the fiber right to my UDMP and skip using their box/equipment. Just have to switch out the copper SFP for a fiber one.


You can 100% just do wireless mesh, but I have it disabled on my UDMP

 

[Cmaier]

View attachment 39085
This is what my UI network currently looks like. Later this summer I'll probably try switching to fiber, I am pretty sure I can just run the fiber right to my UDMP and skip using their box/equipment. Just have to switch out the copper SFP for a fiber one.


You can 100% just do wireless mesh, but I have it disabled on my UDMP
View attachment 39086

Since we’re sharing, here’s a small part of my network - I can’t fit the whole thing in view!

 

[Andropov]

Yup, that's the reason we wired the house when we bought it. Cost less than it took to upgrade the Zinsco panel, so we didn't mind. Turned into a huge boon when the pandemic hit and we had to work from home. Spare bedroom with ethernet ports was suddenly a home office with 1Gbps symmetric to the corporate network.

Wireless interference and the "only one device can talk at a time" really kills the total throughput possible, IME.

I'm doing the exact same thing in a couple months (wired ethernet for all rooms and access points), but it's impressive how much better WiFi has gotten (bandwidth-wise) over the last few years. I think I would be able to saturate the 1Gbps backhaul of my Express 7 if I tried.

Reliability and latency are another thing though. I have a networked Time Machine drive (both drive and client connect via WiFi) and it doesn't really work. Backups are completed (most of the time) but the UI to browse previous backups takes a lot of time to load them, if it loads them.

From what I could gather on the internet, it doesn't work well over WiFi. I'll see if it improves once everything is wired.

 

[Cmaier]

WTH was my brother laser printer doing last night?

 

[fischersd]

Yup, that's the reason we wired the house when we bought it. Cost less than it took to upgrade the Zinsco panel, so we didn't mind. Turned into a huge boon when the pandemic hit and we had to work from home. Spare bedroom with ethernet ports was suddenly a home office with 1Gbps symmetric to the corporate network.

Wireless interference and the "only one device can talk at a time" really kills the total throughput possible, IME.

Did you just wire it or did you run PVC conduit? (if the latter, you would future proof it....you know...when one day you want to run 50TBit fibre.

If you just wired it, if you didn't staple the Cat5/6 cable in place, you could use the existing to pull new plastic twine leader lines to pull new cable.

 

[japanime]

We have TP Link mesh which works pretty well most of our wireless devices but I'm also hard wired for both my laptop and my Mac Studio, where I need the extra speed. Even with today's advancements being wired is infinitely faster.

I have the same setup as you, it seems. TP Link mesh, but wired for my computers. I don't know how secure/trustworthy TP Link really is, but I've never noticed anything that caused me concern.

 

[Eric]

I have the same setup as you, it seems. TP Link mesh, but wired for my computers. I don't know how secure/trustworthy TP Link really is, but I've never noticed anything that caused me concern.

I haven't had any concerns about its security but there is no comparison in speed when it comes to being wired. For example speedtest shows around 90 megabits on wireless and around 450 megabits when plugged directly in. For general devices around the house that don't need high speed transfers that's fine but when dealing with media and large files plugging in is the only way to go.

 

[Cmaier]

Thanks to this new router, I learned that my leviton light switches sometimes decide they want the same IP address. That explains a lot. Set the primary culprit to a fixed DHCP lease in the router settings, and we’ll see if that makes things more stable.

 

[Nycturne]

WTH was my brother laser printer doing last night?

If you look at the device rather than the port, it should have some guesses as to where the traffic is going? It’s not perfect as it relies on some databases for identification, and if it has no clue it will just show up as “SSL/TLS”, but maybe?

I'm doing the exact same thing in a couple months (wired ethernet for all rooms and access points), but it's impressive how much better WiFi has gotten (bandwidth-wise) over the last few years. I think I would be able to saturate the 1Gbps backhaul of my Express 7 if I tried.

Reliability and latency are another thing though.

It’s just that there’s so many asterisks that impact your actual throughput that I’m not sure how many people are in the right place with the right setup to really flex WiFi 7. Back compat, channel sharing/interference, it all eats into the available throughput quickly. I haven’t even bothered upgrading my WiFi 6 APs because we don’t even have anything that could take advantage of the extra bandwidth, or their WiFi 7 Phys aren’t any faster (iPhone). The fastest WiFi devices I have are basically capped at around 400-500Mbps real world measurements anyways.

Absolutely agreed on the second paragraph.

Did you just wire it or did you run PVC conduit? (if the latter, you would future proof it....you know...when one day you want to run 50TBit fibre.

If you just wired it, if you didn't staple the Cat5/6 cable in place, you could use the existing to pull new plastic twine leader lines to pull new cable.

It’s just wired, but it can handle 10Gbit just fine when we actually start needing it. I have just started leveraging 2.5Gbps, which does help accessing the NAS, but there’s not much yet in the house that needs more than 1Gbps links to the switch. I did put the home office switch on a 10Gbps uplink to the main switch because the price of a 2.5Gbps switch with 10Gbps uplink and PoE got cheap enough, but it’s overkill for my needs.

The reality is that with a properly rated switch, the _network_ can route a lot more traffic per second than the link speed to any one device, and that adds up quick as you add more clients.