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Router, wi-fi, home LAN advice

If you buy Unifi from BroadbandBuyer they supply a free 3 year licence to the UnifiCloud Portal, thereafter it’s £10/Device/Year. I have deployed a lot of Unifi and it is now our go to for small networks, using their PoE switches is really convenient and tidy, no wall wart psu or bricks needed, the switches go into the same Portal and it’s dead easy to update firmware across the entire system, change password, add SSID, Guest access etc.

When I have to use PowerLines I deploy Devolo as they have proved to be less prone to failure than the other stuff I have tried out, in fairness this stuff gets better, cheaper and more reliable as it matures but a wired network is always preferable to PowerLine in y experience and opinion, I’d maybe pull back a bit and go with luke warm garbage.

Repeating never works 100% when you get a busy network and bunny hop more than once in my experience.

A decent cabling guy can make things very discrete and domestically acceptable but there is a greater cost involved in cabling a house so it likely only makes sense if you’re staying put, although the construction companies I do IT work for seem to be rolling RJ45 throughout a lot of their builds these days so must be something buyers are looking at especially as home offices must be spinning up at a rapid pace these days.
 
You don't in anyway need the cloud controller that should be made clear to anyone looking into it.
Set up a controller on your network somewhere and you are golden.

Broadbandbuyer do offer a service to provision the device to your controller I believe.
 
You don't in anyway need the cloud controller that should be made clear to anyone looking into it.
Set up a controller on your network somewhere and you are golden.

Broadbandbuyer do offer a service to provision the device to your controller I believe.
Yeah you can download it for free from the Unifi website and install it on a local PC, it’s a bit of a pita, quite slow and needed a specific version of JAVA. BB will send the dishes out already setup with you chosen WiFi names and passwords so you just plug them into a network cable from a PoE switch or use the provided PoE brick.

The Portal is handy if you have dishes in 2 or more locations, office, home, cottage for example, change the password just once or add a new WiFi SSID and it will be in all 3 buildings immediately. Pays your money takes your choice.
 
I find it unlikely most home gamers will need to pay the subscription. Oh and you can run it off a raspberry Pi as well, or in a VM.

I suppose in your specific use case, where someone has three properties, I suppose it makes sense, I dont have a holiday cottage so fail to see the need to pay the subscription.

I don't find it slow.
 
I'm using a Tenda Mesh Wi-Fi System with good results.

I wish I had gone for the ≥200 Mbps version.
 
Always found starting the controller a bit slow and if Java had been auto updated it broke, this was on Win 7 PC’s, never tried in on Linux, when the Cloud Portal appeared I moved all our sites to it. The Cloud Key dongle they sell seemed overpriced for smaller networks but the Portal works a treat for not much dosh.

Gamers/Enthusiasts generally don't need hand holding, for some home users with a big house or multiple locations the BB helping hand option might appeal. It’s free for 3 years so not a bad deal really.

There are loads of triple dish Mesh WiFi kits appearing these days, I guess spurred on by the BT Whole Home system, Amazon, TP Link, Netgear etc for a couple hundred quid might suit some folk better than Unifi with the management software on a local PC or an App on a phone.
 
To be fair I found the BT Whole home stuff to be perfectly fine, I really only dived into unifi because I am a geek!
 
We tested a variety of mesh systems when designing our enterprise wireless LAN architecture and they were rubbish in terms of consistent actual speeds compared to conventional, albeit high end, cisco WAP/switch architecture. I also suspect that like powerline devices, finding fully interoperable replacement nodes for legacy systems will prove a PITA.

My two pennyworth:

-For a domestic setup, your router is just fine.
-Work out where you think your extra APs need to be and get a sparky to run and number enough cat 6 data cables from your router to these locations.
-An easy compromise here is to use UV and weatherproof cat 6 ethernet cable and run it round the outside of your house like aerial cabling.
-Dedicated APs at consumer price points are rarer than you may think - D-Link make a great, if bulky, cheap one that has a few spare ethernet ports on the back.
-you can also just wack an ethernet switch at the end of one of the cables if you just want cabled devices in one area.
-I have never been given a decent router by an ISP. EVER.
 
The TP Link might be better, I couldn't say.

What was with your Tenda?

It started off fine - vast improvement, but then just started dropping out for no reason. Nothing to do with firmware or anything like that. I sent it back and replaced it with the TP Link, which hasn't missed a beat (probably famous last words).
 
It started off fine - vast improvement, but then just started dropping out for no reason. Nothing to do with firmware or anything like that. I sent it back and replaced it with the TP Link, which hasn't missed a beat (probably famous last words).
There is usually a reason. These are logical devices and unless they go faulty they should always behave the same. So if the system did work fine and then stopped and it hasn't broken then it must be something else. I'll take a shot in the dark a) co-channel interference from a new external network(s) or b) something creating interference on the frequency band. Were you on 2.4 or 5GHz? The former is more prone to a) and b).

But without being there its just a guess.

Cheers,

DV
 


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