What Networking Upgrade Delivered the Biggest Real-World Improvement?

Hardware Hub Networking
1

Hi everyone,

I’m planning a network refresh for a small office and have been thinking about which upgrades actually make the biggest difference in day-to-day reliability.

Many discussions focus on faster hardware, but in real deployments it seems that good network design often has a much bigger impact than simply buying newer equipment.

For those managing home labs, small businesses, or enterprise environments:

  • Which upgrade gave you the biggest improvement?

  • Better switching?

  • VLAN segmentation?

  • Wi-Fi redesign?

  • Fiber backbone?

  • 2.5GbE or 10GbE upgrades?

  • Better monitoring and management?

I’ve been comparing different ecosystems, including UniFi, MikroTik, Cisco, and TP-Link, and it seems every platform has strengths depending on the deployment rather than there being one perfect solution.

I’d really like to hear about real-world experiences instead of marketing claims.

What upgrade made you think, “I should have done this much earlier”?

Thanks!

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Setting up your wifi for optimal coverage. We’ve had all our APs upgraded about a year ago (all Ruckus gear) and it manages to serve all clients just great! But… there are still some dead zones around the building where people do actually want to use it, but have a hard time getting a stable connection.

In general, for most office applications here at least, greater speed isn’t used by anyone (with some exception, but they prefer wired anyway).
But when people come to our faculty reception desk with questions, they enter a kind of dead zone which makes it hard to figure out if they have actual authentication or driver problems or are just not able to get a signal through :expressionless_face:

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Off the top of my head… probably QoS design.
Anything else is hard to say, as it’s going to be very situational.

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To be the most reliable you need to have everything wired that can be wired. Remove as many devices from wifi as possible. And after doing that, make sure you have the proper amount of wired in access points to properly cover your area for the remaining wifi devices. You should never have dead zones, but you also shouldn’t have overlap where you have roaming issues.

For the rest, it depends on what the location is. Residential doesnt need fiber and 10 gig backbones to the network, but medium sized businesses do so that you dont choke things down. Enterprise often needs much higher than 10gb backbones these days. It depends how many devices and how much traffic is really going on.

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Like others said…depends, but for me:

  • Desktop to NAS being 10 gig is nice
  • Good quality unlimited fiber internet
  • opnsense instead of a commercial router (on one of those aliexpress firewall thingies)
  • Main devices wired

That said I’ve run things across a wifi bridge for years and its fine too if distances are small. You can push stable 1gig over a bridge with the right gear if you have to. Not ideal but also not as end of the world as it is sometimes portrayed

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Depends on the workflow and the business. Previous job: mostly devs and data analysts, some marketing folks, HR and finance and the IT people.

Upgrading the old trashy wifi APs (which were surprisingly running custom dd-wrt) with unifi (from 2 to 5 APs) for better bandwidth and removing deadspots made HR, finance, marketing and management happier. Some people in dev started using wifi as well. I don’t like unifi, but I don’t regret the decision.

For the backend rack stuff, we were on gigabit for the longest time. We actually saw performance degradation on our backups, from moving from 2x HPE 48 gigabit ports (10G backbone between the 2) with balance-alb over to cisco (also 48 gigabit ports) with LACP and the cisco swtich stacking thing. I personally was against the side-grade and wanted to see 10G upgrade on all servers, but that never happened while I was there (I think it eventually happened 2 years after I left).

Despite all servers running on gigabit (4 to 6 ports + IPMI), the biggest advantage to the workflow was having VMs balanced across hypervisors and storage and decommissioning some old servers (ddr2 era core2 intel motherboard servers - we took them down around 2019, those servers were probably more than 10 years in service and a huge liability).

Unless I had no other choice, I wouldn’t be using gigabit these days, except for specific things. But if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can get away with it by doing a ring-network between your servers on a high-bandwidth port (with OSPF) and use gigabit to access the resources. Wendell showed something like this on mini-PCs with thunderbolt networking, but if you can do it with 10G ports, on proper servers, it’s better (apalard did something like that as well).

Heck, if you’re very desperate and the business needs aren’t that big, run your services on a single server, have your data backed up, maybe even replicated (in addition to backups) and configure a workflow to quickly deploy and restore your stuff (it could be in the cloud, if you’re already using something like S3 for your off-site backups or it could be on another weaker server you keep around as a spare). If availability is important, replication is key (for a bit more costs). If that’s not as important and a few hours of downtime isn’t a big deal, just have good (and tested) backups.

As for the brands, I wouldn’t look too deep into it. I just go with mikrotik, cuz it’s cheap and pretty good bang-for-the-buck. But don’t run any proprietary router. My own experience tells me to stay away from pfsense as well. If you’re not invested enough to run an openbsd, freebsd or linux router directly, I hear people liking opnsense and openwrt as firewalls (I’d stick with CLI in all honesty, some things that appliances do to make the user’s life “easier” kinda makes the sysadmin’s life harder IMO).

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A wifi bridge where the devices doing the bridge are dedicated to that task?

Or wireless back haul/meshed access points?

Im not at all against wireless bridges, I use them at work for the past 15 years and it has been rock solid. We stared with some 200mbit wireless-n bridges and eventually upgraded to some wireless-ac 600mbit bridges. I loved those. We still have the wireless bridge as a failover after we upgraded to a fiber line between buildings.

But I am definitely against meshed APs around a home, unless they have dedicated backhaul radios (which almost nothing does these days)

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The setup i had was somewhere in between - consumer mesh style devices, but had one wifi6 radio dedicated to backhaul and was only a couple meters. Ended up with a link speed around 1.2 so wasn’t ever the bottleneck on a gig network. +2ms. It was OK…

Have since bought a place and put in fiber to link rooms - definitely nicer

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WiFi is probably one of the biggest wins you can get.

  1. Cable what devices you can, exile your slow and IoT devices to 2.4GHz. Main systems on 5Ghz only.
  2. No meshes, cables to all IPs. If you need wireless links, use point to point bridges. Faster, and let you put a switch on the other end.
  3. Ideally one good AP. Or multiple weaker APs with power turned down.
  4. Put your AP centrally, not next to something metal. (IE. Not on top of your rack).
  5. Lots of walls means lots of weak APs, wide open spaces means high-gain, hiigh-power APs.

Beyond that it’s a matter of measuring, and fixing low hanging fruit. There are lots of potential issues - bad consumer modems, cgnat and lower MTU due to PPPoE/Cable - but whether they cause a problem for you depends a lot on what you do.

The dream of networking is plug it in, and instant network. But the truth is there are always caveats. All these products “UniFi, MikroTik, Cisco, and TP-Link,” have things they are good at, and bad at. For a prosumer, I’d stay away from Cisco.

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switching from meraki to ubiquiti unifi. saving a ton not paying the meraki tax

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Good advice, remember if the OP switches to Unifi, make sure the whole network stack is Unifi.

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12

Best upgrade? Proper network segmentation. VLANs killed the broadcast storms and isolation headaches. I had a flat network with 50+ devices and random slowdowns. VLANs fixed it overnight. Second best was moving to a wired backhaul for all access points.

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13

Everything you said except I use PfSense

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Shielded cable can make a difference depending on where and how far you are running it. I have seen companies cheap out on the wrong cable.

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Biggest network improvements for me:

Opnsense router with segmented subnets.

Cat6a (stay away from copper clad)

10GbE

Pihole, Geoblocking, threat blocking Egress

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For wifi dropping the slower speeds, tweaking rates can be one of the best things you do so slower or poor signal clients don’t eat up a ton of airtime, and the APs can only send certain data at the slowest rate they support.

When we had slower links good quality QOS, and when we had an ISP with oversized buffers making TCP traffic drop closer to the source helped a lot.

EAP-TLS with a good setup with fast roaming can make roaming and auth take under 10ms

For reliability getting nearly every kind of device and area on its own VLAN and proper vlan pruning, we have a few devices that sometimes bug out and start mirroring every bit of traffic they see a bit like a network loop. Making sure that VLAN never was on the trunks that went to APs drastically helped reduce the impact of them. I would love to do L3 to my access switch and fully separate out VLANs that way but we have some stuff that needs to be on the same broadcast domain and I am not setting up VXLAN.

Anycast gateways so our routers are active/active and fully separate so a crash can’t bring them down and I can update in the middle of the day.

For management proper DNS for all network devices pointed at a loopback address on them so it is always up and never pointing at a real physical interface was really nice.

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Oh, I forgot about mesh wifi. Mesh wifi was a game changer for gatherings that had 20+ people on wireless and extended wifi footprint.

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10gig’ing the rack and traffic-shaping rental-unit’s VLAN.

Splitting things into various VLANs helped security, so that was an improvement as well I guess. Attack-vectors are very limited now.

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