I currently have an old Linksys WRT1900ac and am thinking about building out a proper setup with a U6 Enterprise, Mikrotik CRS310-8G+2S+IN, and something running opnsense for a router. My question is: am I creating headaches for myself by running three different kinds of gear?
Ubiquiti’s USW-Enterprise-8-PoE fits the bill but is 2x the price. Netgear has an AP but the switches seem to be hated. The mikrotik doesn’t have poe but I can use an injector but their APs aren’t well liked.
I have a desktop and NAS that I’d like to be on 2.5gbe. I’d also like some VLANs to separate my other things from my important things.
Side note, it seems like the WiFi6E/2.5gbe gear is really slow to roll out. What’s everyone waiting for…
Engenius has been really fantastic for me. Expensive, but worth it. Ive posted about my experience over on the STH forums and can dig it up at some point.
The reason for slow 6E uptake is 7 is right around the corner. For ex, engenius has the wifi7 APs shipping next month. 6E was more a bandaid than a cure for most of the problems with WiFi people have been having.
If you are only doing one AP then I would follow @infinitevalence and/or @BVD advice. Unifi really only makes sense if you plan on having more than one AP or switch or whatever. Otherwise it is a pita to maintain the controller for a single device.
I run the controller app on my laptop only when I need to add new hardware. It doesn’t need to be on all the time. If you do run it all the time you get statistics, but I don’t need statistics in order to know that my wife is consuming massive amount of bandwidth streaming movies 24/7.
I can back this up. I’ve had a TP Link managed switch for years and then went with their access points (EAP 225/245) and have had great performance. I also recently changed my Ubiquiti Edgerouter-x for an ER605 VPN router. Managing it all with the Omada controller (running in a docker container).
The only issue I have has with the Omada controller is if you also run a PiHole and the controller goes down, there isn’t a good failover for DNS.
I am about to swap to att fiber from comcast. I have a ubnt router, but I haven’t bothered to call comcast to change the wan mac address. I also have a ubnt 8 port (4 are poe) switch with 4 ac lite wifi access points (they are often cheapest if you get them directly from ubnt). I am using a wired backhaul to all of the access points though I know that if I get the better access points with more channels I can do a wireless mesh setup. I like having the ubnt poe switch, it makes it ridiculously easy to turn power off and on for the various devices, and the interface makes it simple to determine what device is on which port downstream. The ubnt router may be more difficult to configure than pfsense (I have configured both), but it is capable of gigabit without getting pricy.
Everything I can I am connecting with wires, then using wireless for the mobile devices. I just reorganized it all and currently have wires strung up along the tops of doorways while I figured out the ideal locations for the access points, but now I don’t get drop outs anywhere in the house or the yard. Last week I ran new cable through the attic to several the top of wall points throughout the house. Next step for me is to drill through the top plate and run the wires down the walls then terminate them. I have crimped and punched down a few hundred connectors so that should not be an issue.