In response to @wendell IoT video today

Networking Networking Hardware
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Hello all.
I was just perusing through the new video, half paying attention as it’s not something i believe in. At least at the moment.

I share alot of fears regarding data privacy that many among us do but i feel alot of every day people with no interest in the nuts and bolts of tech actually trade their privacy for ease of use and plug and play convenience.

For my employment i am a Tececoms Engineer and I work at Openreach, which is a part of BT here in the UK.
On a daily basis i visit customers of all backgrounds and circumstances with various (mostly internet) issues which need to be rectified through fault (bottleck) finding, testing and manual graft.
We operate on a vast mojority copper VDSL network and i can tell you from first hand experience most data issues are inside the home.

I see IoT devices strung up by have a go DIY dads constantly. Hive systems, Nest, 500 Alexa’s. washing machines and all the other stuff.
Everything seems to suffer if there is any kind of issue with its connection to the outside world and WiFi is the thing that EVERYONE uses for EVERYTHING.
Tv with the broadband hub next to it. Nah dont plug it in just use WiFi etc etc

Very few people are interested enough to even know the difference between WiFi and Internet, let alone what those little yellow ports are on every static device they have, or an ethernet cable.

So my point here is that IF this privacy system is to work and be adopted widely it would need to sit in between the WiFi access point (as i believe the future of development in this stuff will be wireless) and the internet point. AND i think there may be a set of products which can do it. MikroTik

A few years ago i fully ethernet cabled my home. I rerouted my connection to a small cupboard and wired it all into there so it was all out of sight and out of mind.
Once up and running i found my transfer speeds to be about a quarter of a gig and not gigabit going through my ISP hub. It’s marked as gigabit.
Then i decided on a decent access point in the centre of the building on poe so also i wanted a switch/router which is a rare beast.
I was going to buy a cloud router?(i think) from ubiqity and i got and AP AC from them but i had issues with POE and i dont like their software model for the control and adoption. Not to mention their gear is expensive.
So I ended up buying a MikroTik cAP AC access point and a RB2011UiASRM router. Total cost £100 with a new AP and used router/switch with POE
The cAP AC… It has serious router capabilities. Like it could be configured to be wired diectly to a modem without anything else and all sorts of things.
The Router OS they use is really strong and its also installed on their router/switch gear but with more capabilities and although i am not good enough to tell you it will deffo help in your IoT endevours i think picking up something like an RB3011UiASRM would be very worth your while as it may do exactly what you want. It has POE and 10 gigabit ports. It can replace your ISP hub item and theyre reasonable price wise.

Just my 2p @wendell

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hmmmmmmm

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This is common as WiFi is accessible to the every[wo]man. No one RTFM and as soon as you start throwing in cables, people cry fowl because that is so much harder than hitting the WPS button. “Also Cables are ugly!”

With that said, I hard wire when I can but there really is not any accessible IoT stuff that plugs into ethernet. I have jumped on the WiFi IoT train but I have those items running on their own network with two access points to cover the whole house. I also only use stuff that can be flashed with tasmota in order to de-cloud all of that stuff. I then use an Odroid-N2 to run HomeAssistant and I control all of the devices through that. We do have HomeAssistant setup to talk with the Google Assistant but the only thing that it can do is see the devices that we pass through to it and turn them on or off via Home Assistant. We can set timers and events, through Google, but again, it just passes that to HomeAssistant, and Home Assistant does all of the work.

I have not ventured into the camera stuff yet, which will be hardwired with PoE, but I cannot find the kind of cameras that I want that can function without phoning home to the internet. This is where Wendell’s video comes into play.

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yeah so what i am getting at is these mikrotik items have a really good built in os and i reckon the phone home can be stopped right there.
As in if you go wired try the rb3011uiasrm and if your IoT gear is WiFi then a cAP AC
I am not sure on this as i struggled to configure it to run my VDSL service and internal network but i am sure someone with @wendell skill set will be able to tell right away if its suitable.

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I replaced Vodafone’s terrible Gigafast router with an hAP ac², and it’s an amazingly stable bit of kit. RouterOS is very feature-rich, if not a little intimidating, but it’s easy enough to set up firewall rules to be able to block this kind of traffic, and monitoring on it is also really simple.

Most products from companies that do both consumer and enterprise gear will have the tools for this. Ubiquiti’s stuff is pretty similar in terms of features, but you’re paying more for a much better thought out UI.

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