I hope its OK to ask an open ended question like this.
I’m planning a network install for a house which is undergoing some renovation. Its about 40m end to end, but has 3 internal stone walls which are about 1m thick. I will likely be using a fibre connection from free.fr (currently on mobile broadband there which is surprisingly good).
No particularly specific requirements, Home assistant, NAS, home office, etc, but I’m keen to future proof as much as makes sense, and I’m also feeling that I don’t really want to spend too much time building what I can sensibly buy.
Current plan is to use unify kit, and probably cat-6 for any hard to reach cable. Dream Machine SE at at one end of the house, another switch in my office towards the other end.
4 APs to cover spaces between the big walls (assuming bedrooms can be covered by spill through wooden ceilings) and 2 additional outdoor APs to cover the garden spaces.
Any reasons not to use WiFi 7? I’m assuming the external infrastructure can support more than 1GBPS, but maybe the hardware will expire before there is any real use for super high speeds. I’m living with a 50 Mbps connection today so I don’t have clear expectations.
Other than laying spare cat6 to each room which is being re-decorated, any other easy wins I should take now?
Coverage/congestion is a little bit guesswork since the walls have holes here and there - all I can be sure of is they block even 2.4 GHz reasonably well. At least indoors I don’t need to worry about the neighbours too much! This is my first ground-up install though so any pointers are welcome.
Right, just because a technology like WiFi-7 is new, does not mean it is for you. If you have the money, go for it. Otherwise 802.11ax is more than enough for a gigabit connection(cap is 9.6). No ISP I know has 46gigabit connection. That is more on the enterprise scale for internal traffic. Otherwise your setup seems pragmatic and logical.
I’d go for cat6a or cat7, just in case. As for wifi, I believe wifi 5 is still fine. Wifi 6 has beam-forming and supports more clients, but that’s not a really big advantage, compared to the price you pay for wifi 6. IDK much about wifi 7, I didn’t know it was out yet (except for some manufacturers larping as supporting wifi 7, when the standard was not even out yet).
But if the price between a wifi 5 and 6 AP is not that big, obviously go for 6. Unifi APs are nice.
The only reason I can see that you’d want fast wifi with a slow internet connection is if you’re doing a lot of in-house streaming (jellyfin).
U6+ seems like a great fit to me. It is fairly cheap and offers good performance. Wifi 7 doesnt add much except much greater bandwidth for the room the AP is located in, and a better ability to get through other wifi interference from being in an area with a ton of other wifi networks. Your tick walls seem like that wont be an issue. You can probably stick with the U6+ all the way until Wifi 8 releases which will actually be worth upgrading to since its main focus is on lowering latency and improving stability.
If you are putting cable behind walls that are off now I would go for at least Cat6A so that you can use those cables to pass up to 10gb speed through them to future AP upgrades. And also think about if you want to run any fiber cable behind walls to 2-3 locations for using between switches instead of the copper cable.
Seem the plan is valid to me, I love Unfi systems. I did not see if you did survey or not, I ususaly do a survey to see my frequency saturation in the area. Wifi7 if you have devices that can use the frequencies may be bettter depending on the saturation of the other frequency.