I don’t use the reporting functions much, but it was certainly handy when my wife started working from home full-time during the first lockdown.
Her: “What’s wrong with the internet? I keep losing video on my conference call!”
Me (after a quick look at the network status showing 100% availability across the board): “Nothing my dear. It’s your company’s infrastructure that’s at fault, not ours.”
I’m not sure the Dream Machine is Ubiquiti’s best product. It tries to do too much in one package and I think it ends up not doing anything very well. Some of Ubiquiti’s stuff is great and competes well with some of the top enterprise gear - some of it is decidedly iffy consumer-grade.
I’m not dissing Asus in any way - in my last house, the Asus stuff worked flawlessly and the user interface (common across the whole product range) is really nicely laid out and super-intuitive.
In this house, I need APs I can fix to the walls/ceilings to get good wi-fi coverage.
I’m happy with Unifi EdgeRouterX for firewall duties, a couple retired Cisco switches for access and Orbi for wireless. I had a couple Unifi APs some time ago but got frustrated that I had no access to my internal network when my internet service was down.
I gave them to a colleague that runs them. Orbi is cheap crap but works fine as AP-only. BTW, I setup/manage/have a 300+ radio Aruba network at the office I never go to anymore.
I have a Palo Alto PA-220 at home too but it’s too much like work to configure. I really don’t need the functionality at home. I manage redundant clusters of Palo FW at the office.
Yeah, horses for courses. Basically every house here in western Canada is made primarily of wood (and ours is ranch style so only on one level) so wifi issues are certainly not as bad as in stone/concrete.
I can certainly attest to the Fritz! devices being suitable for a solid network. In addition the manufacturer, AVM, provides updates many years long.
n my case I can even attest that even with daisy chained switches (Netgear GC110 and Silent Angel Bonn) and mixing brands it still works flawlessly.
Note: here, one of the Service Providers provides an Fritz!Box as an upgrade over a ZTE device. My SP provides Fritz! only.
I have a main router (Fritz!Box 7590), a Fritz!Box 7530 in bridge mode with a wired backhaul directly running via copper to the router and a Repeater (3000) connected wirelesly.
I daisy chained some switches of other brands (Netgear GC110 and Silent Angel Bonn) in the wired part of the network and even daisy chained a GC110 with/behind the Repeater.
By the way, the repeater feeds a 4th GC110 which for instance connects to a smart tv. I haven’t been using that myself, but do not get any complaints.
That said, the range of products from Fritz! may be smaller than that from Ubiquity. For one, I couldn’t find a switch with SFP from Fritz!. Hence I have a network of devices mixed from different brands.
Full disclosure: I recently received a new router, again from Fritz! from the service provider (SP) but for reasons of uniformity in their network.
Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro has been rock solid for me for months now. I am also using the US-8-150w and a UAP-AC-HD. 4-5 months now and not a single hiccup.
I have two locations with Ubiquiti gear. For the newer one, which is a 2000 sq ft wooden house with Cat 5e in the walls that was originally used for wired phones (something pretty common in the 2000s in the US), I’m using UniFi Dream Machine (the basic one, not Pro) a few UniFi Flex switches and a meshed UniFi Flex AP (probably overkill but I used as a wireless bridge between two wired segments while I was waiting to repurpose the in-wall wiring). To be honest I preferred the very direct controls of older Ubiquiti and UniFi gear, including the ability to write text configurations for my EdgeRouter (for dual WAN load balancing) than the fancy new UniFi interface that hides all the direct controls, but I am a nx shell fiend. However, I can’t complain about wired or wireless performance, my Roon setups are rock solid. And I’m one of those bad people who daisy-chains switches: wires in either location don’t go where I’d like them to, and running new wires would be way too inconvenient. For example, in this place the fiber ONT is in the kitchen, but the place where all the Cat 5e converges is an outside closet on the garage wall, without easy access to power. So we have the UDM wired to the ONT, then a PoE injector into the Cat 5e from the kitchen to the closet, a PoE-powered switch there inside an utility box, then star Cat 5 to different rooms (the old wired phone setup), but all sorts of obstacles make it hard to avoid more switches.
Another vote for AVM and their Fritz!Box products. My first ISP had used them as standard for years, and when Fibre arrived at the house a year ago, I needed to switch to a new ISP, and chose one that also provided Fritz!Box routers as standard.
Currently have a Fritz!Box 7530 as the router, with a Fritz!WLAN Repeater 1750E and two Fritz!Repeater 1200 units all in a Mesh.
I have no choice but to daisy chain switches dont have the options to run a cable to each unit requiring LAN. I can only manage out 4 runs from main Unifi 8 port switch to cover the rooms that needed it. Two APs run off the main switch as do to main servers as they are in the same data cupboard but the rest are away from here.
I have two other unifi switches attached to the main one so that in each room I can feed the stuff that needs it. I have no issues at all with stability. Bandwidth is limited to 1gb for those switches and then divided up for the rest of the devices but none of them are really pulling more than 100mb and never do any of them do that at the same time so bandwith is not an issue. Even Ubiquity show many scenarios with multiple switches it all depends on what topolgy works best for your situation.
I’ve just swapped-out my old ASUS RT-N66U ‘N’ router for the ASUS RT-AC86U ‘AC’/Ai MESH router.
I couldn’t be happier. It’s much, much faster, has greater range and is very easy to install. Highly recommended!
Sometimes daisy-chained switches are unavoidable. It clearly looks like you know what you’re doing and you fully understand the bandwidth limitations and how to work within them 
Yep it works as well as I could hope for. Looking at her topology though i just noticed that one of my aps has been switched to ch12, must had been a slip of my hand there changing something else. Back to ch11 for that.
Hehe, I’ve just reread your post and chuckled quietly -
I kept the WiFi SSID of our network when my wife and I moved back to the UK from Austria mainly because I couldn’t be bothered to reconfigure every device to a new network. Now it’s a constant daily reminder of an exciting, adventurous chapter in our life together.
Router: Fritzbox - cant beat the reliability.
WLAN: Ubiquiti.
But for smaller places, the WLan of Fritz will do.
Well, to be honest, your highest aim should be security in an IoT driven Home. This means at least, you can define Virtual LANs to separate critical devices like NAS, Laptops, iPads from less critical devices like Wifi based SmartHome devices (Power sockets, room climate, vacuum cleaner).
Main idea behind this is: If one of this IoT devices communicating with a cloud service by the vendor and this cloud platform is access without permission (aka hacked), then there is a change, that they can access your local Wifi/LAN by the manufacturers devices. This should be the main point.
So, the AVM FritzBox is a very well consumer device, but lacks some security features, i.e. no VLAN support, just a port based firewall, IKEv1 for VPN.
The Unifi devices are great for Wifi, but have no support for DSL internet in their portfolio.
Mikrotik might be an option, but they are quite hard to configure, at least you could get SFP (V)DSL modem supporting VDSL Profile 35. (That might work for Unifi as well.)
From a radio perspective: Use more Access Points with less signal strength, at least, this would be my guessing.
Hi,
I currently have the same ASUS RT-N66U router. It has been very reliable so far (knock on wood) handling over 15 devices. However it is getting long in the tooth so and I am planning to replace it with a newer Asus unit. I dread the time consuming task of having to set up a new router the way I like it. Can the settings (preferences, security, passwords, fixed IP addresses, etc) of the older unit be transferred/copied some way to the new one?
Thanks in advance.
Very nice, and well constructed.
If that was my network map I would be very tempted to redo it in a mix of “overly large serif” fonts with lots of purple hardware boxes then post it over in the 1.8 haters thread.
Hi,
It’s dead easy. It literally took me 5 minutes to swap-out the routers. You save the configuration settings from your old router onto your PC, and then just transfer this file onto your new router once you’ve installed it:
That’s great! Thanks a lot!
Thanks. I try to do things as well as I can, though unfortunately that usually means there’s a lot of hard work involved. I think I’ve run close to 400m of Cat 6 and the fibre is 40m of 8-core pre-terminated steel-wire armoured cable that runs from the house to the office/mancave/workshop out in the garden. The Rackstation used to live in the house, but with the fibre card installed, the “cool ‘n’ quiet” fan mode is disabled by the firmware and it was too noisy.
Hehe, I think I’ve tweaked too many tails over the 1.8 update already! 
