Network Overhaul

[stuie]

Morning all

Im very overdue a local network rebuild at home so as its been a while im after advice

Current setup
VM 1gb/s router, wifi switched off ( its bugged firmware needs a factory reset to get it back on) This is at one end of the house in my box room / study
Old TPlink router only runs 5ghz no 6/6e support. This is in the middle of the house with a cat6e link, I get approx 100mb/s in most areas of the building

Usage
Couple of laptops, max of 3 tvs. PS5 2 pixel 8a's and my daughters fire kids tablet. Main PC and Linux NAS server are hardwired back to the Superhub

Long term goals
Move to at least 2.5gb/s for hardwired links
WiFi 7 with 6ghz support, may as well if Im doing it, possibly 2 APs rather than one to spread out over the area a bit better
Implement sufficiant parental controls, daughter is currently only 5 but if Im rebuilding I may as well plan hard for the future, I already have her tablet locked down but id like something centralised so I can control multiple devices, a plus would be with some level of VPN support baked in

Pricing
Lets be honest as little as possible to cover the bases. I dont need Enterprise grade firewalling and management with 99.999% uptime and failover, I dont have or need 10gb fibre links this is for 2 adult and 1 child in an average sized 3 bed semi, I dont have Cameras, doorbells and Voip phone systems to worry about.

Ive been looking at ubiquity and thinking maybe a Dream router 7 and a u7 pro? Or am I better off spending the extra and going for a cloud gateway max, a couple of u7's and a POE switch / injectors? Although price really starts to ramp up doing that but I do understand the benifits of versatility having seperate boxes to do dedicated jobs allowing easierr expansion later on, I hear this can become a bit of a gatweay drug for the unifi product stack

Whats the unifi parental controls / content filtering like?

 

[DIABLO]

The content filtering is pretty good, it enforces safe search on; YouTube, Bing, Google. And blocks adult sites. If you want more fine grain control of what is blocked, where the block lists get added to daily, some of which is not necessarily adult, but you may not want your kid to look at when they get older, there is a premium subscription service. But for porn and violence, the basic filter is most probably good enough.

 

[Firegod]

Implement sufficiant parental controls, daughter is currently only 5 but if Im rebuilding I may as well plan hard for the future, I already have her tablet locked down but id like something centralised so I can control multiple devices, a plus would be with some level of VPN support baked in

I've had a Firewalla Gold SE for a few months now and it works really well and has lots of cool features. Might that be of any use in your plans?
Firewalla Gold SE

 

[Rainmaker]

Do you even need 2.5G? It sounds like you'd be better served asking VM for a working Hub and then just setting up something like ControlD DNS - one profile for you and your wife (basic ad and tracker blocking), and one for your daughter (ads, trackers, adult, gambling, drugs etc). Sorted.

 

[Avalon]

Stop and think about this for a moment, you can spend £40 on a switch and £15-25 on adapters for your NAS and PC to communicate at 2.5Gb, or the same and they can connect at 10Gb via SFP+, but if you are only streaming media from your NAS at 20Mb/s, then it’ll still only be streaming at 20Mb/s. You’ll still be limited to gigabit WAN, so it’s only devices on the switch that will benefit at this point.

 

[stuie]

I've factory reset the superhub and configured the wireless on it, running that certainly helps over the side of the house its located but its trash on the other side if I leave the other TPLink (AC1700) https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-c7/ off, but that unit is crazy old now. I tried setting them both to the same SSID but they dont seem to like to handover to one another very nicely.

I hear what your saying about 2.5gbs a second and honestly no probably not, I just thought it Ib doing something Id be better off doing it right?

Might just grab a u7 lite and a poe injector...

 

[Rainmaker]

I hear what your saying about 2.5gbs a second and honestly no probably not, I just thought it Ib doing something Id be better off doing it right?

Avalon and I certainly weren't trying to piddle on your parade, or dissuade you. With experience comes temperance (sometimes ), and when you say:

Usage
Couple of laptops, max of 3 tvs. PS5 2 pixel 8a's and my daughters fire kids tablet. Main PC and Linux NAS server are hardwired back to the Superhub

There is absolutely no use-case for 2.5G there. Nothing you've mentioned needs more than 50Mbps let alone 2500. With the three of you doing 'something' each at once, even a 150Mbps line would be ample. Your PC to NAS connection, as Avalon says, could mean direct playing a 1080p rip at <10Mbps or it could mean shuffling datasets back and forth where SFP28 would have smoke coming out of its ears... but likely the former!

Nobody wants an F1 car on derestricted B roads, nor an oil tanker on a racetrack. Plan, deploy and tune for efficiency at the intended use-case with some overhead. Optimise rather than grab headlines. You already have 1Gbps (albeit DOCSIS?) - what parts of your usage are too slow for you presently and leave you hanging around waiting? Likely you'd fare just as well or better on 150Mbps FTTP with a good router, aqm/sqm and a decent beefy switch and/or DAC between your NAS and PC. Be careful of over-speccing again, though - a 10Gbps switch into a 1G WAN is bufferbloat hell waiting to happen. Again, it's about balance. What FTTP options do you have, if any? The WiFI coverage is worth a look, if you have dead spots. Is your Hub in a central location or shoved in a corner somewhere?

 

[stuie]

Avalon and I certainly weren't trying to piddle on your parade, or dissuade you. With experience comes temperance (sometimes ), and when you say:

There is absolutely no use-case for 2.5G there. Nothing you've mentioned needs more than 50Mbps let alone 2500. With the three of you doing 'something' each at once, even a 150Mbps line would be ample. Your PC to NAS connection, as Avalon says, could mean direct playing a 1080p rip at <10Mbps or it could mean shuffling datasets back and forth where SFP28 would have smoke coming out of its ears... but likely the former!

Nobody wants an F1 car on derestricted B roads, nor an oil tanker on a racetrack. Plan, deploy and tune for efficiency at the intended use-case with some overhead. Optimise rather than grab headlines. You already have 1Gbps (albeit DOCSIS?) - what parts of your usage are too slow for you presently and leave you hanging around waiting? Likely you'd fare just as well or better on 150Mbps FTTP with a good router, aqm/sqm and a decent beefy switch and/or DAC between your NAS and PC. Be careful of over-speccing again, though - a 10Gbps switch into a 1G WAN is bufferbloat hell waiting to happen. Again, it's about balance. What FTTP options do you have, if any? The WiFI coverage is worth a look, if you have dead spots. Is your Hub in a central location or shoved in a corner somewhere?

Honestly Im not sure, the 1gb/s connection from virgin is mainly cause I get doubled up also being with O2 and I get all my tv etc through them too so Im not looking at changing to a different provider.

The Superhub is right at one end of the houe hence why ive then stuck that TPlink router in place to serve Wifi duties but its getting old now being only 1700AC. It is cat6'd to a central location.

As said Id like to improve the wifi signal and possibly speed a little but mostly this is also thinking about some level of protectivity for the little one.

Maybe a cloud gateway ultra to act as better routing and some parental controls, thats only 95 quid then just an AP like the 7lite or 7pro along with a cheap POE injector? We are now talking <300 notes even if I go for the U7pro so much more manageble and logical

1gbs is probably plenty quick enough as you say

 

[stuie]

Also to add im not set on ubiquity.

If theres other options that might do what I need for less, or better my ears are open. Ive just been looking at cudy for example the c200p caught my eye along with something like the ap1100 but the Parental Controlls seem lacking

 

[Rainmaker]

As I said earlier, for your use-case I'd suggest DNS filtering is a better option and it allows you to remain vendor agnostic for routing and wireless etc.

 

[stuie]

As I said earlier, for your use-case I'd suggest DNS filtering is a better option and it allows you to remain vendor agnostic for routing and wireless etc.

Just looking into that now. So I could use somehing like that then id just need something that could do per device dns or just control it on the devices themselves.

 

[Rainmaker]

Just looking into that now. So I could use somehing like that then id just need something that could do per device dns or just control it on the devices themselves.

Depends on the devices, but you can install a DNS profile on any i-device (MacBook/iPad/iPhone/whatever), set custom encrypted DNS on most other stuff (Android, Windows, etc) or use custom DNS entries for any outliers. Since your goal is parental control you can just set up a child profile, block all adult/drugs/gambling/malware/phishing etc on your daughter's profile and get whatever router and WiFi AP you want (or don't).