{"id":1927,"date":"2018-03-25T16:36:32","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T13:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/?p=1927"},"modified":"2018-08-29T15:36:15","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T12:36:15","slug":"extreme-home-network-makeover-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/extreme-home-network-makeover-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Extreme Home Network Makeover &#8211; Part 1 &#8211; Why &#038; What?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I decided to upgrade my home network for several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dodgy Wi-Fi connection<\/li>\n<li>Wi-Fi dead spots around the house<\/li>\n<li>Monitoring network activity and who&#8217;s using downloading a lot and impacting other&#8217;s experience<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So after exploring and searching I&#8217;ve settled with the <a href=\"https:\/\/unifi-sdn.ubnt.com\">Ubiquiti Unifi<\/a> ecosystem. I&#8217;ve been following the company for many years now and I&#8217;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<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PoE built into the switches rather than relying on PoE injector for each camera around the house<\/li>\n<li>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<\/li>\n<li>Unify experience across devices with a single dash board<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But that doesn&#8217;t mean that there&#8217;s no cons on changing my network infrastructure. In fact, because I&#8217;m using pfsense, I&#8217;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&#8217;t seem to be able to provide a workable solution for that.<\/p>\n<p>So I bite the bullet and went ahead and ordered the following devices:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Unifi AC-Pro UAP-AC-Pro x3<\/li>\n<li>Unifi AC Lite UAP-AC-Lite x3<\/li>\n<li>Unifi Switch 24 Port US-24-250W x2<\/li>\n<li>Unifi Cloud Key UC-CK<\/li>\n<li>Unifi Mesh UAP-AC-M-US<\/li>\n<li>Unifi Switch 8 Port US-8 x3<\/li>\n<li>Unifi Security Gateway USG<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But unfortunately we didn&#8217;t have a dealer for Ubiquiti here in Kuwait so I had to purchase those devices online.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-1944\" src=\"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-1024x384.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"384\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-1024x384.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-300x113.jpg 300w, https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-768x288.jpg 768w, https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-800x300.jpg 800w, https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/PANO_20180125_154437-1200x450.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>And because I&#8217;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&#8217;t enough. That&#8217;s an additional $300 for the cable and $500 for the handyman.<\/p>\n<p>Most of my purchase came from Amazon and bhphotovideo.com. I couldn&#8217;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&amp;Ship office then forwarded to Kuwait. That&#8217;s around $700 just shipping the item from NY to Kuwait. If you&#8217;re wondering, there&#8217;s no Ubiquiti dealer\/shop in Kuwait.<\/p>\n<p>Note: This project was completed back in January 2018.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/?p=1957\">to be continued on Part 2<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s using downloading a lot and impacting other&#8217;s experience So after exploring and searching I&#8217;ve settled with the Ubiquiti Unifi ecosystem. I&#8217;ve been following the company for many years now and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,154,36],"tags":[160,78,156,155,158,157,159],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1927"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2300,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions\/2300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salehalsaffar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}