Networks Ubiquiti home installation - need help

Has anyone got any real experience with UBNT equipment? I'm in a particularly swamped wifi area with lots of routers broadcasting over each other, so firstly would like to solve that with a more bespoke and controllable solution.

Secondly, although I've got a very, very good VM connection (420mbit), it does suffer from bufferbloat owing to the poor Superhub 3 and non-existent QoS.

To solve the first issue, I could just slap a Ubiquiti AC-Lite AP on the Superhub and off I go - no issues there. To solve the second issue, I could also add an EdgeRouter and switch the Superhub into modem only mode. The EdgeRouter will also negate the need for a PoE injector for the AP. Crucially, it'll also completely eliminate buffer bloat.

The question I have is: Do I need any other components for this setup? A CloudKey? USG? Or are they adding extra capability that is unnecessary for what I require?

Any help appreciated.

 

I swapped out to Unifi APs a while back partly due to the same issue as you're having, and partly for something that does no-faff handoff between APs - they nailed both aspects of the brief.

You get the injectors included with the APs, so there's no additional cost - hanging them off a POE port is obviously a lot more elegant though. Note that not all of the Unifi POE products use standard POE, so an AC-Lite needs a Unifi POE port to feed it.

If you're going Unifi APs, you may as well standardise for the sake of ease on a Unifi Router as well, as opposed to the ER - I nearly picked up a USG-Pro however at the time there were limitations with policy routing (which was P1 on the brief), so I settled for a DrayTek. @jinq-sea uses the USG-Pro though. There's the USG that may fit the bill as welll.

You need somewhere to run the Unifi controller, preferrably that's always on - you don't log into the devices directly as you would your VM hub. I run the controller on a Linux VM on an always-on server, but the CloudKey is a nice little device that can be a standalone Unifi controller.

If you need physical ports, you'll need a switch as well. Unifi might be a little bit overkill if you don't need anything fancy though - a £20 netgear GS108 will cover the essentials.

 

I do use a whole raft of UBNT stuff at home, guilty as charged. I've also got a Cloud Key (it was cheap), but a RPi installation is top banana too apparently.

I'd advocate the USG and the USG-Pro - both top notch bits of kit, easy to manage, and decent data throughput. I've got my USG-Pro hooked up to a Draytek Vigor 130 modem, and that then feeds Unifi switches, Unifi AC-Pro APs, and is all controlled via a Cloud Key. It's reasonable money to get it all set up, but I can honestly say it's brilliant - robust, decent wi-fi, along with loads of decent management features. I even think they've sorted out the policy routing question now, too.

Unifi Controller on an RPi

I think there's a demo portal you can log into via the Unifi site, too, so you can have a look at the management features before committing. To be honest, I'd probably go for:

- USG (Pro is rack mounted and therefore a lot bigger than the USG);
- RPi as controller;
- Unifi 8-port 60w PoE switch; and
- Unifi UAP AC Pro AP

It's quite spendy, but you'll not need to throw anything else at it for a good while.

As Tad says, you could cut down on the switch, but you'll need a PoE injector for the switch, which is a bit more cluttered. You can also power the Cloud Key with PoE, so if you're fancying one of those, I'd go PoE switch.

Feel free to ask questions!

 

Thanks to both of you so far. I do have more questions though (sorry..)

The main reason I was looking at the ER-X over the USG is that it does QoS for much larger bandwidths. The standard USG is rated up to around 60Mbit whereas the ER-X will do up to 300 for the same money - and I've got a 420mbit pipe.

Here's the questions:

1/ Are there features of the USG that I'd genuinely NEED that the ER-X can't provide?
2/ I already have two TP-Link 5 port gigabit switches, so they'll suffice right?
3/ Benefits of RPi vs CloudKey? Cloudkey seems extremely neat solution and no need to have a machine for dedicated controller.

I'm trying to do this for under £250, as I could buy a respectable off-the-shelf mesh wifi solution for that, albeit without bufferbloat elimination. The Ubiquiti route seems much better. OK, I'll only have one AP initially, but it WILL cover my entire home and should be capable of maxing out my 420mbit connection over wifi quite comfortably.

Further thoughts?

 

1) Nope - key (only?) real difference is that the USG/USG-PRO are managed through the Unifi controller, the ER-X is managed via a CLI you'll have to learn
2) Yep
3) Cost. IMO CloudKey is the only way to go if you don't already have an always-on server.

 

ER-X can also be managed by web interface too can't it? Seem to remember watching a German chap configure his from a web browser. Seemed fairly intuitive?

So, what components would you recommend that I purchase, given I already have the switches?

 

Oh, can it? Hmm, perhaps. I'll confess I didn't look at the EDGE series as I had already decided on Unifi, and will continue with it. I thought they were all CLI based config. If the USG doesn't have enough grunt for you, you're looking at the USG-Pro, which blows your budget in one fell swoop, so ER-X may be your best bet. The Unifi series key advantage is that if you're a supplier/supporter, you can manage client sites remotely, easily, from one portal. It's really handy for home use too, but not quite the same game changer.

I'd suggest in that case pick up the ER-X, the CloudKey, an AC-PRO and make sure you can power the Cloud Key.

Note that the AC-PRO comes with a POE injector but the Cloud Key does not. Your options are the Unifi Passive POE injector, any brand 802.11af/at injector, or powering via USB (adaptor as opposed to a device port though) somehow.

 

Thanks for the suggestions and I think you're right. The ER-X only has one PoE port; however, the AP comes with an injector whereas the CloudKey does not (unless I misread the garb). As long as I have 1x PoE injector, it's not an issue. I could power the cloudkey with the injector and the AP passively.

I notice you've mentioned the AC-PRO vice the Lite. Disregarding the slight bump in throughput, what are your reasons over the Lite? There's a decent saving dropping to the Lite.

 

Oh, my bad. I picked up AC-PRO from somewhere... perhaps myself!

The Lite is fine too, though I'd opt for the LR over the Lite, and there's not much cost difference. Same throughput, but the LR has an improved antenna and should be better at range and through obstacles. Any one of them are going to be leaps and bounds better than your vanilla consumer all-in-one device though.

I think the POE port on the ERX may be passthrough? I.e. if you're powering the ERX via POE hen you can use a passive POE device in the POE out.

Just briefly checking it out, that's correct - it comes with a 6w AC adaptor and you can't use POE out using that, you need the larger 12w AC adaptor, or power via POE.

 

I've read that a lot of people have had wifi signal problems in standard homes with the LR version, owing to the amount of power it puts out. It's almost too 'loud' and whilst signal will reach the extremities of the property just fine, close to the AP, performance will be worse than the Pro or Lite.

 

Interesting, I hadn't seen that. I think the UAP-LR just had jacked up Tx power, but the AC-LR is a different design of antenna that gives the "LR" bit.

I installed an AC-LR for my folks over Christmas and in testing great performance both next to the AP and at the opposite corner of the house, FWIW.

You can adjust the Tx power anyway if you run into issues, and you'll still get the Rx benefits, which can be important for mobile devices.

EDIT: https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Wireless/AC-Lite-vs-AC-LR/m-p/1589127/highlight/true#M165646

 

Hmm, ok. That's given me food for though, indeed.

Realistically, I don't need the LR for my current home. That said, we move around quite a lot and that's not to say I don't need it wherever I may end up posted to next. Handy to know that the Tx power can be adjusted. An AP that's too loud is technically worse than one that's too quiet as it'll swamp the wifi devices searching for the AP in the first place.

Regardless, we think that I can get away with an EdgeRouter, a CloudKey and an AP of some description?

If yes to the above, then that should solve both wifi coverage and also the issue of bufferbloat.

 

Looks like Tad has been both avoiding work and being very helpful

I had also not realised the EdgeRouter was configurable via a web UI - every day is a schoolday!

 

I can't get on YouTube from work's PC, it's on the naughty list. When I get home later, I'll link the video if you could both spare a few mins to check the middle chunk of it and make sure that it can be - and that I'm not being a complete bellend.

 

You don't need to run the controller all the time, it's just needed for setup.

EDIT: At least that's the case for the wireless APs.

 

Nope, we're the bellends... https://dl.ubnt.com/guides/edgemax/EdgeOS_UG.pdf

EdgeOS has a full fat GUI... I'm not sure why I thought otherwise. I would have picked up an ER-8 instead of the DrayTek if I would have realised...

Not necessarily the case. You can get away with it, but if you want to use something like a guest portal (amongst other features) then it needs to be running. And a guest portal is one of those things that once you use, you'll never know how you did without it, in my experience.

 

So I'm a little late to this thread, but I'd like to digress and recommend the Mikrotik hAP AC instead.

https://mikrotik.com/product/RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT

It's a 3x3 chain dual band full router. They sell it as a power-level access point but it's also got a 5 gigabit ports which can be layer 3 or bridged for layer 2. There's a simple initial wizard that let's you choose to use it as a Home Router, Dual Wifi or something similar, and that automatically designates one of the gig ports for your ISP modem.

You can turn off the 2.4g entirely if you wish or run dual 2.4g and 5g. You can disallow N on 5g making it AC only if you want also or you can allow both. It's rock solid, regularly updated, and supports all the advanced features you want far in excess of Ubiquiti.

It also has the benefit of being a single unit, or you can buy two and have the first run a CAPSMAN server so you can have an enterprise wireless roaming network without the need for cloudkey or a controller.

The GUI isn't as pretty as Ubiquiti, in fact it's so jam packed with features it's sometimes hard to find what you want, but it's very capable.

If you buy this today on Amazon you'll get £10 off with BIGTHANKS - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mikrotik-RB962UIGS-5HACT2HNT-RouterBoard-hAP-ac/dp/B01BMMK4HI = £88.57 effective spend so well under your budget.

Plus I can attest to the single unit covering my double-fronted 3 bed 1000sqft home from the middle (stairs up the middle, router under the stairs) and getting a strong signal in the whole house.

 

Thanks Zoon, but although it's slightly more wallet friendly, I'm still leaning towards the Ubiquiti kit. It just seems a cleaner, more simple solution. It might not have the amount of features that the mikrotik has, but that's not what I'm after. I'm a fan of 'keep it simple stupid' and the Ubiquiti ecosystem seems very easy to configure, use and add to when required.

Thanks for the confirmation Mister T, and to you and Jinksy for the advice. I'd kind of got an idea of where I needed to be, but the reassurance from both of you was what I was looking for. Thanks again.

 

You can have a play here to familiarise yourself with it before you pull the trigger - https://demo.ubnt.com/manage/site/default/dashboard

The APs are as easy as anything to set up though, minutes.

 

I mean, there’s a full Wizard mode where everything you need is in one page on the Mikrotik. It’s going to cost you half as much, have the option to do more if you want to dig for it, and lower power draw. Happy to send you a screenshot of the one page Wizard mode if it’ll help. It’s literally as easy as open the webpage, select drop down for Dual AP Router, customise SSID and password and in your case set the ISP interface to work with your modem, I assume DHCP, and all done.

As it goes, I have used the ubiquiti 2.4ghz UAPs and the controller and I can confirm it is relatively simple and stable. My bro in law manages a large Corp estate of them too. Just wanted to offer an alternative