I ordered a Unif AC Pro yesterday. After some research I am going to try to use my old Netgear Nighthawk as the router. I plan to add a second Unified Pro or Lite later after I figure out how I am going to route the Cat6 cable.
Does anyone have any advice for me before it arrives on Friday?
My Netgear Orbi setup with one satellite that worked greatm before home assistant has been going offline frequently. Someone in the Netgear forum says they can reproduce the problem regularly by running Docker. Anyway in not getting rid of Home Assistant, so the Orbit has to go.
You can get the controller setup and running, I run mine along side HA on a Pi3, load seems fine with both applications running. You need it running to setup the AP though.
Plan ahead for switching over all of your devices that connect to Wifi. Some do it gracefully, others needed a full factory reset.
I have had troubles with devices that run on 2.4GHZ only ( sonoffs) connecting to the AP. Seems like I need to turn off the 5GHz band add them and turn it back on after.
Plan now if you want to make a guest network or separate networks. You can assign each SSID to a separate VLAN which is nice to segregate traffic. Your router/switch need to support the VLAN tagging though.
I didn’t have any probs adding sonoff to my existing AC LR.
Good plan with the vlans - eg one for IOT devices that you don’t want talking to the internet.
I’ve paired mine with a edgerouter X.
Thank you both for the ideas. I saw that blank feature and was wondering if I could setup my kids devices on a separate network that uses opendns to limit accessories certain sites while leaving my network unblocked? Either way something to play with. And i just looked it up, my router does support VLAN tagging.
My Orbi has been flaking out lately too, causing some pretty bad Home Assistant crashes (nonresponsive til killed and restarted). I don’t want to give up on Orbi yet though!
I have been running my new Unifi AC Pro for over a week now and the only downtime we had was one outage from our cable internet provider! One WiFi access point has been enough to cover our entire 2200 sqft house. My gaming 12 year old hasn’t even complained about slowness even though they are on the other side of the house from the access point! I may not end up getting a second access point… at least not until my in-laws build a house behind ours.
So what is the actual device you’re using? When I google Unifi AC pro it just shows access points. Isn’t there a router, or some other sort of “controller” of some sort?
In my case I turned WiFi off on an older Netgear Wireless Router (it hands out the IP Addresses) while the Unifi wireless access point is connected to it via ethernet. If I want to add a second Unifi wireless access point I have to run Ethernet all the way it… but the advantage is there is no additional wireless traffic creating confusion.
It is intended for businesses… such as a restaurant that wants to provide reliable WiFi for their customers, but the cost is reasonable enough that it is very competitive with the expensive wireless mesh systems (like Netgear Orbi). Especially if you do it on the “cheap” like I did.
By “cheap” I mean that I didn’t go all in on their hardware. They sell Unifi branded routers and even a dedicated server to run their admin software. I could have easily spent $400 or $500. However, I have been very happy with the results with the one $150 Wireless Access Point. I installed their admin software on my Home Assistant server.
Thanks! Good to know. Looks like that won’t work for me bc I’d have to run too much Ethernet could get a Ethernet over powerline but I’ve not had success with those.
My ISP’s retarded modem/router had a hard limit of 16 wifi devices, and poor coverage at that. I tried to supplement it with other wifi access points and extenders.
With multiple IOT devices, I couldn’t add any more devices to it. The whole thing sucked.
I bought a Ubiquiti AC Pro and am very very happy with it. I can now unpack the 20 WIFI bulbs sitting there, and set up a whole lot of other stuff.
My house is pretty large, and I’ll be getting another one. Luckily it is a pole house and really easy to cable under the bottom floor. Upstairs is a bit tougher, but I think I can get away with a second one downstairs.
My son just tried streaming some Netflix in his bedroom for the first time and it wasn’t good. So at some point I will probably have to run some ethernet upstairs. Luckily I’ve recently become pretty good at patching drywall.
could get a Ethernet over powerline but I’ve not had success with those.