For our various friends/families who ask for our advice, we can assume they do not care about: VLANs, ease of management, latest firmware updates, POE installs, 10Gbe, etc. They want WiFi coverage across their home, enough bandwidth to stream video/play games, and reliable routing. I.e. they want it to just work and don’t want to think about it.
I have been asked to help setup a network for my parents’ new home and am having a difficult time assessing what advantages prosumer gear offers them since they basically want it to “just work” and that’s all. I am having a difficult time identifying which features/specs within the prosumer level equipment would benefit this type of user.
For example: roaming (802.11k, 802.11r, 802.11v) is important for all users. We want their iPads to quickly and seamlessly switch to the upstairs AP when they walk upstairs. I am not sure if non-prosumer APs will do this properly. Are there other specific features/specs that are important for reliable operation and strong coverage?
Specific context around the install environment:
Client devices are not new enough for 802.11ax, I will go with an 802.11ac spec for APs
Home + desired outdoor areas will require either 2 or 3 APs for optimal coverage. I do not want to use the APs in mesh mode- each AP will get ethernet uplink back to the switch.
WAN bandwidth is not fiber, 1Gbe across the board will suffice, no benefit for 2.5Gbe or 10Gbe.
It is an older home and there is no in-wall ethernet. Renovations are being planned and I will help to add ethernet wherever easily possible.
I use Unifi at home, but thinking of trying out MikroTik for this install.
MikroTik wAP ac - $89, outdoor AP. Going to test a few different configs, but we may go with 2 first floor and 1 upstairs in lieu of anything outdoors. TBD, will see what works best.
Total cost under $250 for: router, 5 port switch (w/ 1x POE), 3x 802.11ac APs.
(Not sure if consumer equipment even exists that can beat this price without being absolute crap)
TLDR: Has anyone else gone with prosumer equipment for an install at extended family’s home? What was your main motivation in going for a prosumer network? What advantages did it have that cannot be had with cheaper options?
If you are managing it then Unifi. Their remote management is really good and hard to beat. I tell my family that if they want me to be IT support for them then buy Unifi and I will add it to my managed networks and go from there. I don’t have time to deal with 6 different networks using 6 different vendor platforms.
If you are not actively managing it then Asus. Something like this guy:
Asus has sane defaults and if you end up doing more advanced stuff it will handle quite a bit for a AIO box. The wifi is good quality and the webGUI is actually useful and usable compared to many competitors.
Mikrotik is not really user friendly and if you have to have them make changes then they will be lost in the weeds really quick. Also if they have to do a factory reset the defaults aren’t really usable for a home network imo. If you will be managing it then it is a different story. I have used Mikrotik and I think that @PhaseLockedLoop is rolling it out to his family.
Generally if it’s worked for me it’s what I recommend.
With that said it’s also stuff I’m familiar with which means when they call me for tech support I can point them to a fix / workaround.
It’s also tech that’s lasted me 5 or 10 years plus so it’s not some cheap pos or some hunk of junk.
I’ve been happy with asus routers and usually have had to upgrade them due to not supporting the next level of isp speeds or an electrical strike on the wire.
I’ve also used netgear pro series unmanaged switches for most of the time for home networking as I don’t have any special vlan / managed configuration on the wired side of things.
Currently using a unifi wifi access point and it’s been running for 2 plus years without any issues and chose this because it’s one of the leaders in the wifi segment and I needed to move the ap from where the internet comes into the house because it’s was tied to the router to upstairs and into the middle of the house to improve the wifi signal.
I used to recommend a Dream Machine and a U6 Lite. Now I recommend a Unifi Express and a U6+. Price is $300 after tax, which is about what a typical consumer router costs now days. They are easy to set up and rarely have issues with such an extremely basic setup, and performance and reliability has been far above Netgear and Asus and such. Everyone who has put them in has been more happy with them than any other network gear they have ever used before. A lot of people like to trash on Ubiquiti now days and for good reason in the more complex stuff, but for a really basic setup it is so far beyond the typical consumer gear most people are used to they think it is heaven.
Interesting you say that the defaults are not good. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? Is it just a few well known things? I can easily just fix those. if theres a ton of bad defaults then it makes me not want to use the product at all.
This makes me somewhat reconsider and lean toward Unifi. I already know and use Unifi. I am considering MikroTik because 1) they are more price competitive than Unifi and 2) I am debating getting some MikroTik switches for my homelab since they have some very competitively priced 10G stuff. I figured this is a good “trial run” on MikroTik.
Can you expand on what specifically is better about it that non-technical users should care about? I don’t know what about the prosumer stuff is actually better for basic setups.
I understand a non-technical user does not care about “support for roaming” but they do care that their device switches from the basement AP to the upstairs AP properly, so they should care about support for roaming. That said, they do not and should not care about support for VLANs or VPNs.
as stated in the OP, I suggested a MikroTik solution for $230.
I’m open to spending more than this if there is strong reason to do so within the context of non-technical users who want it to just work.
So basically I have no interest in spending more than $230 for a network that has comparable features to the one I suggested. I guess I am open to spending $400-500 for a network that is vastly superior to what I suggested.
It is more stable than much of the modern consumer gear. I often have people ask what good setups they should get because they are tired of the stuff they currently have dropping connections or needing to be rebooted, even when it is nearly new. That is the biggest thing right there, but for the average person unifi is extremely easy to make any rules they want. Typical gear you have to know things like IP addresses and how to format rules and such, things most people never want to do or care about. Unifi lets you say “I want to block TikTok between these hours”, and go make a rule and just select TikTok, and select the phones and tablets they want it to apply to and hit save. They like that you can easily see speed to main sites from the dashboard so you know the network gear is working well, what is using their bandwidth (not IPs, but actual traffic like Netflix, Youtube, etc) and easy green/red graphics of how their wifi is performing. It is much easier to set up properly working things with Unifi than most regular consumer gear.
You can say “well they will just go off wifi and get around any of that”, but if you don’t let them have unlimited data they learn pretty quickly how fast stupid videos chew up what they can do
I usually recommend something that’s based on Mediatek’s Filogic 11ax series and is support by OpenWrt. Hardware is realtively easy to find and doesn’t break the bank, no need to worry about silly cloud services (remote access is of course possible) and it’s easy to add transparent wireless bridge(s) and/or expand if needed. OpenWrt also relatively easy to upgrade if needed but it may include some additional steps. The 4xA53 based variants performs really well and “just” works, I do usually “downgrade” wifi to 11ac because it much more stable with clients in general and it’s not like it’ll make a practical difference for such users anyway.
Ok thanks. I had not realized that the basic AP/router one finds at a Best Buy still suffers from the same constant instability issues. Brings me back to installing DD-WRT on a Linksys WRT54G. Yes 802.11g. Remember when 802.11n was a massive improvement?
Anyway stability alone is a huge reason to go prosumer. Can’t believe the true consumer stuff is still so bad.
Good thoughts on the Unifi parental controls. In this use case, the “kids” simply drive back to their own homes to circumvent parental controls.
I will just say I love MTIK for its value, but if im doing a remote managed solution something with a dedicated controller like TPLink would be my preference.
I used to have a Unifi install and had my in-laws on the same controller so I could manage theirs remote as well and it was great for that. I had other issues with Unifi which is why I switched first to Engenius, and then to TPlink.
The nice thing with the TPLink is that you can get a small POE switch, and 1 or 2 AP’s and control the whole thing from a containerized controller either on prem, in the cloud, or on your home server depending on your need and use case.
There are some quirks here and there, not better or worse than other network vendors.
Depending on how much work you want to put in, you can build very complex setups with Mikrotik, for example Port Extend or interface Bonding. Capsman for managing all the access points is easier to use than Cisco (Hey, Cisco ).
Here in NL, I don’t think that I’d recommend any general consumer to buy their own equipment… If they need more than the default thing the ISP supplies at least (large house/special needs).
It just isn’t worth the effort of having them do more if they only need one (maybe two) devices connected through LAN and are fine with just (sub-par) wireless.
I switched to a MikroTik hAP AX² about a year ago and love the device. We’ve got a small place, so we don’t need a secondary AP. But if I had to expand, I’d probably go with a second hAP AX² or get a hAP AX³ as main and use the AX² as AP. Unless they come out with a lite version of the cAP AX, because the current one is just too large for home use imho.
How did you allow the devices at your in-laws to route to the controller at your home? Site to site VPN? Or did you expose Unifi controller to public WAN?
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