Extreme Home Network Makeover – Part 1 – Why & What?
So I decided to upgrade my home network for several reasons:
- Dodgy Wi-Fi connection
- Wi-Fi dead spots around the house
- Monitoring network activity and who’s using downloading a lot and impacting other’s experience
So after exploring and searching I’ve settled with the Ubiquiti Unifi ecosystem. I’ve been following the company for many years now and I’ve been a very fond of it for long time now, and the family are complaining about the dodgy Wi-Fi connection gave me a good excuse to upgrade my network infrastructure. And by choosing Unifi I get the added benefits of
- PoE built into the switches rather than relying on PoE injector for each camera around the house
- PoE end-point switches and AP so less cluttering and centralizing power feed for the home network so I can add a UPS in the future for powering my network and cameras in the event of power outage
- Unify experience across devices with a single dash board
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no cons on changing my network infrastructure. In fact, because I’m using pfsense, I’m going to lose some flexibility when moving to a fully Ubiquiti Unifi solution like load balancing dual-WAN that Unifi for some reason doesn’t seem to be able to provide a workable solution for that.
So I bite the bullet and went ahead and ordered the following devices:
- Unifi AC-Pro UAP-AC-Pro x3
- Unifi AC Lite UAP-AC-Lite x3
- Unifi Switch 24 Port US-24-250W x2
- Unifi Cloud Key UC-CK
- Unifi Mesh UAP-AC-M-US
- Unifi Switch 8 Port US-8 x3
- Unifi Security Gateway USG
But unfortunately we didn’t have a dealer for Ubiquiti here in Kuwait so I had to purchase those devices online.
Some might be wondering why a lot of devices. The reason is that I need to cover 2 floors and a half (the gym room), and the garden. So ground floor will get two Wi-Fi AP and the first floor will get three Wi-Fi AP because one half of the floor has many walls that one AP will not be enough to cover that half.
And because I’m upgrading the network I decided to also upgrade the network cables around the house to Cat6A for extra reliability and future compatibility for 10G speed. I bought a 100 meters roll (300 FT) and at the end only 70% of house cables were upgraded to Cat6A because 100 meters wasn’t enough. That’s an additional $300 for the cable and $500 for the handyman.
Most of my purchase came from Amazon and bhphotovideo.com. I couldn’t find everything on Amazon (out of stock) so I got USG, UAP-AC-Lite, and UAP-AC-M-US from BHPhotoVideo. All shipped to New York Shop&Ship office then forwarded to Kuwait. That’s around $700 just shipping the item from NY to Kuwait. If you’re wondering, there’s no Ubiquiti dealer/shop in Kuwait.
Note: This project was completed back in January 2018.
