After years of waiting, AT&T Fiber finally became available on my side of the street,1 giving me access to sweet, sweet gigabit speed both to and from the Internet. This became the impetus for me to replace most of my home network.
I was using a set of pretty old eero base stations, back from when they were a Relay sponsor years ago. They were great, but I had a recurring issue with the entire network would drop to 100 MBps, despite my switches being gigabit-capable. This was annoying on my previous Comcast connection, but simply not tenable on fiber. After talking to several friends, I opted to dive into the UniFi universe.
My initial order looked something like this:
- Cloud Gateway Ultra as my router, plugged directly into the AT&T fiber modem
- A couple of Ultra 210W switches for my wired network. These provide POE for my access points:
- Three U7 Pro Wall access points
It was the access points I was most excited about, as WiFi 7 would prove to be a huge upgrade in speed for the wireless clients.
Everything arrived in just a couple of days2 and setup was super easy. It shows that a bunch of folks at Unifi used to work at Apple. Sadly, the problems started almost immediately. It seems that for some people, the U7 line of access points are troublesome when it comes to IoT devices and even some Apple gear. For me, this showed up with our Apple Watches, which would drop off the Wi-Fi and not reconnect without a full reboot. This led to Watches that wouldn’t communicate with our iPhones and spin their radios up so hard that battery life was a true disaster.
From my hours of reading up on this issue, it doesn’t seem to affect everyone, so perhaps I was just unlucky. It means that my WiFi 7 dreams were dashed, and the U7 Pros were swapped out for a set of U6 Mesh access points. Since putting those in, things have been flawless. I’m very happy with the coverage provided by the access points, and it seems like the U7 line just isn’t ready for prime time.
Here’s how things look now:
As you can see, I have two main switches. One is in the house, and the other is at the end of a long run of weatherproof CAT-6 out to my office. Everything runs back to one of those two switches, via CAT-6 in the walls of my office, or through the attic of the house. If you can run networking cable where you live, it’s worth the time and effort.
There are two much smaller wired USW Flex Mini (the gigabit version of this thing) switches in play as well — one is on the workbench in my office, and the other is in the entertainment cabinet, providing a wired connection to our Apple TV and a Mac mini I keep around for a few oddball tasks. These switches are powered via POE, which is really cool.
Of course, there are loads of products sold under the UniFi brand, including cameras, locks, and network attached storage devices. I am curious about the cameras in particular, and may swap out my Ring cameras for them in the future, but that would require some Ethernet runs to some pretty terrible places around the outside of my house. We’ll see if I tackle that project in the future, but for now, I’m pretty happy with my network.
- My neighborhood was built in the early 1950s, and our utilities come in overhead from the back of our lots. Directly behind my house is a large public concrete drainage ditch. The utility company has a right of way on both sides of the ditch, so there’s a strip of land between the back of my backyard and the ditch that isn’t really mine. It is there that the closest utility poles are located. When AT&T first rolled out fiber in our area years ago, they didn’t run it down my side of the street, and I assume that was to avoid all the nonsense that comes along with the ditch. We have a new fiber company coming to town, and maybe that is what finally got AT&T to finish out their install, adding service to a whole bunch of addresses in the same situation mine was in. Whatever happened, I was psyched to get the call that I could finally ditch my old Comcast Business Class connection that was slower and much more expensive than the 1 GBps fiber I am now enjoying. ↩
- UniFi gear ships from here in Memphis, which makes it super quick to my house. The company’s founder, Robert Pera, is a big name around here. ↩