*** Official Ubiquiti Discussion Thread ***

I now have over 20 devices connected in the house, 3 bed standard sized.
18 of them connect to the Unifi AC lite on a combination of 40 and 80 MHz bandwidth. I have it on the ceiling on the sloped part of the stairwell, easy install to the router in a cupboard directly above it. Which is now a edgerouter 3, previously my old ASUS router.
The old router did the job well, just trying to get everything the same make.

I would go with the SH3 in modem mode, buy a router, the edge 3 is pretty cheap but only really one useable Ethernet port unless you want to software bridge.
I have a unifi switch plugged into the router and another switch downstairs.

For yourself I would recommend the ac lite and a decent router. Get the router from here and the ac lite from amazon. Speed test from my iPad gets usually 280-320 meg on a virgin 350 connection.

The ac lite is around £80 just now..
 
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WJA96 said:
If you MUST wall-mount the access point then get something designed to be wall mounted.

The UniFi AP-AC-Mesh, AP-AC-Mesh Pro, AP-AC-IW, AP-AC-IW Pro and AP-HD-IW are all designed to be wall mounted. The in-wall units are particularly good for your application as you can cut the plasterboard and install a back-box to fit the unit to. And the IW and IW pro give you two RJ-45 sockets and the AP-HD-IW gives you 4 RJ-45 sockets.
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It's not that they must be wall mounted I'd just rather not have wires running up the wall to the ceiling. I'm not D.I.Y savvy cutting holes and running cable isn't my forte but I also would like to try and be as cable free(showing) as possible.
 
As above poor/inappropriate mounting locations will severely reduce the effectiveness of any AP/wireless router/device, you say the SH3 isn’t in an ideal location - is it viable to relocate that as an interim step? If you are taking an external feed up, use external cable and/or conduit, depending on the property type it may be easier/neater to take it into the loft and then drop through the ceiling in an appropriate location. Smaller hole, less invasive, POE injector can be downstairs etc. From experience an an average sized 3-4 bed house is usually doable in 1-2 AP’s depending on construction type. Mesh is also getting a lot of attention in the consumer market, but that’s likely due to people comparing it to combined routers in poor locations, a decent AP installed properly solves that problem in most situations for less money.
 
MarkeR said:
I now have over 20 devices connected in the house, 3 bed standard sized.
18 of them connect to the Unifi AC lite on a combination of 40 and 80 MHz bandwidth. I have it on the ceiling on the sloped part of the stairwell, easy install to the router in a cupboard directly above it. Which is now a edgerouter 3, previously my old ASUS router.
The old router did the job well, just trying to get everything the same make.

I would go with the SH3 in modem mode, buy a router, the edge 3 is pretty cheap but only really one useable Ethernet port unless you want to software bridge.
I have a unifi switch plugged into the router and another switch downstairs.

For yourself I would recommend the ac lite and a decent router. Get the router from here and the ac lite from amazon. Speed test from my iPad gets usually 280-320 meg on a virgin 350 connection.

The ac lite is around £80 just now..
Click to expand...

P4Hcx2s


As you can see in the random diagram I pulled my hub is where the red dot is and viable access points via external cabling is possible in both blue dots are bedroom 1 is above the sitting room, second point bedroom 2 is again a viable place for an AP point, ignore bedroom 4.
Avalon said:
As above poor/inappropriate mounting locations will severely reduce the effectiveness of any AP/wireless router/device, you say the SH3 isn’t in an ideal location - is it viable to relocate that as an interim step? If you are taking an external feed up, use external cable and/or conduit, depending on the property type it may be easier/neater to take it into the loft and then drop through the ceiling in an appropriate location. Smaller hole, less invasive, POE injector can be downstairs etc. From experience an an average sized 3-4 bed house is usually doable in 1-2 AP’s depending on construction type. Mesh is also getting a lot of attention in the consumer market, but that’s likely due to people comparing it to combined routers in poor locations, a decent AP installed properly solves that problem in most situations for less money.
Click to expand...

My ethernet cables for the Xbox and Firestick are very small in length moving the Hub3 or should I buy a 3rd party router (very likely) isn't viable at least not very far a meter at most
P4Hcx2s
.

As I said above I'm not a D.I.Y savy person so drilling holes isn't something I'd like to be doing and I don't even know how to run an external cable into the loft and down through a roof, sorry I'm a bit of a noob although if I could get someone who knows what they are doing that's something I'd certainly prefer to do sounds easier running it through like that.

I'd just like to add the property is rented so I'd like to use the existing holes already created from a previous VM installation as to not cause to much extra damage.

Thanks for replying guys.
 
Apologies for asking a dumb question again (I got my head bitten off in this thread a year ago..); but I have a few questions I'm hoping I can get a yes/no answer for:
  1. Am I right in thinking I can simply buy (as phase one) a single AP (thinking "Ubiquiti UniFi NanoHD Indoor Dual Band Wave 2 WiFi 5 PoE Access Point (2033Mbps AC)"), plug it into my router via a PoE injector if need be, and voila? My plan in order to spread the cost is phase 1: AP, phase 2: USG, phase 3: switch, phase 4: further AP's if need be.
  2. On further AP's, this may be a dumb question but i've been corrupted reading Mesh articles. Can someone confirm that all Unifi AP's need to connect back to the router / switch via ethernet? It isnt possible to simply run the closest AP via ethernet and then simply power up secondary AP's with no ethernet connection?
 
SMN said:
Apologies for asking a dumb question again (I got my head bitten off in this thread a year ago..); but I have a few questions I'm hoping I can get a yes/no answer for:
  1. Am I right in thinking I can simply buy (as phase one) a single AP (thinking "Ubiquiti UniFi NanoHD Indoor Dual Band Wave 2 WiFi 5 PoE Access Point (2033Mbps AC)"), plug it into my router via a PoE injector if need be, and voila? My plan in order to spread the cost is phase 1: AP, phase 2: USG, phase 3: switch, phase 4: further AP's if need be.
  2. On further AP's, this may be a dumb question but i've been corrupted reading Mesh articles. Can someone confirm that all Unifi AP's need to connect back to the router / switch via ethernet? It isnt possible to simply run the closest AP via ethernet and then simply power up secondary AP's with no ethernet connection?
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Why would you ask such stupid questions? Novice!!! <<<<Only joking :D

1.Yes. It will work that easily. You need to use the UniFi controller to set it up initially so if you are thinking of scaling up in time I'd likely put either a cloud key, VM or RasPi in at phase 2 to make the scaling smoother.
2. Some of the later AP's can work in a mesh format although you can only have 1 "wireless" downlink and can't daisy chain them. Best performance would be all AP's cabled back to a switch. It's a situation dependant question, if it was going to be your "main" house AP then I'd say cable it in. If it was for an AP halfway down the garden which will likely get 1 or 2 clients and the odd BBQ then mesh away!

Hope that helps :)
 
With the newer firmware all UniFi AC or HD access points can do single-hop meshing. The AP-AC-Mesh and AP-AC-Mesh Pro can do multi-hop meshing.

Like all WLAN, each hop runs at half-duplex so if you theoretically could get 400Mbps directly at the AP, you’d get 200Mbps at the first meshed AP and if you were using multi-hop mesh, 100Mbps at the next hop and only 50Mbps at the next hop and so on.
 
Brilliant, thanks chaps :p

Essentially I have my router coming in at the back right corner of the house, and our master bedroom at the front left corner. Plus, we recently had the Nest Hello doorbell installed at the front of the house, and this keeps dropping out. My plan is to install an AP cabled into the router somewhere around the back right corner, and then another AP via mesh towards the front left of the house - predominately for bedroom wifi and this sodding doorbell, which sounds viable based on what you've said. I'd love to eventually cable it in, but my wife sees visible cabling as the equivalent of satan - so it will require some delicate running along the outside of the house, etc.
 
SMN said:
Brilliant, thanks chaps :p

Essentially I have my router coming in at the back right corner of the house, and our master bedroom at the front left corner. Plus, we recently had the Nest Hello doorbell installed at the front of the house, and this keeps dropping out. My plan is to install an AP cabled into the router somewhere around the back right corner, and then another AP via mesh towards the front left of the house - predominately for bedroom wifi and this sodding doorbell, which sounds viable based on what you've said. I'd love to eventually cable it in, but my wife sees visible cabling as the equivalent of satan - so it will require some delicate running along the outside of the house, etc.
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Not sure how viable it would be but if you do end up running cables it's really worth considering getting a run or 2 into the loft. A single AP downward facing is plenty enough for most houses and then you won't have the headache of mesh.
 
Steveocee said:
1.Yes. It will work that easily. You need to use the UniFi controller to set it up initially so if you are thinking of scaling up in time I'd likely put either a cloud key, VM or RasPi in at phase 2 to make the scaling smoother.
Click to expand...

I did read about the controller last night, my plan was to install a dedicated Debian VM for it on my ESXi box. Thanks again for your help :D
 
SMN said:
I did read about the controller last night, my plan was to install a dedicated Debian VM for it on my ESXi box. Thanks again for your help :D
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Will be fine, I use Ubuntu server (with Webmin for ease of management) and and the UniFi controller works perfectly fine, in fact it's a fair bit quicker than the cloud key. I also have a cron job running to copy the UniFi backups to my NAS which in turn are copied to the cloud.
 
Sorry to be a noob here but do the Edgerouters function as normal wireless routers and if so how is the wireless output compared to say a SH3?
 
That would be your decision, you can add additional access points if you like.

You may find a single AC-Lite is sufficient, you may not. It'll depend on the size of the property, building materials and so on.
 
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