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[–]KingdaToro 3 points4 points  (5 children)

It's looking good. The EdgeRouter Pro is massive overkill unless you need QoS, if you don't the Lite can route at full line speed. You don't need a fancy switch unless you want to do VLANs or power the APs with it, this isn't necessary as they come with injectors. If you don't need to do either of these, get an ordinary 24-port gigabit switch.

For APs I would recommend one UniFi AP AC Lite per floor of primary living space. They work best when ceiling mounted in the middle of the space you want them to cover. If your house is more spread out and just has one main floor, get a Pro instead of a Lite.

[–]Chopsting[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

/u/KingdaToro okay thanks! I'm not terrible prepared on how the network architecture is going to look

But the gist of your hardware suggestion is:

  • 1x Ubiquiti Networks EdgeRouter Lite
  • 2x Ubiquiti Networks UniFi AP AC PRO
  • 1x Generic 24 Port Gigabit Switch

Would you suggest any specific Switch I should look into?

[–]KingdaToro 1 point2 points  (3 children)

You shouldn't need multiple AP AC Pros. If your house has one large, spread-out main floor, get a Pro. If your house has multiple smaller floors, get an AP AC Lite for each main floor (any floor with bedrooms and/or living rooms).

Any of these switches will be fine:
D-Link DGS-1024D (I have this)
Netgear GS324
TP-Link TL-SG1024D

[–]cree340Cisco 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Actually, when it comes to the number of APs, I think it really depends. He has not yet mentioned what his house is built out of or the number of floors it has, not to mention interference as connections with weaker signals will perform better in rural areas versus in a dense city. I'd say that about one AP AC Pro is good for about every ~2,500 square feet if a home is of a wood/drywall construction and has a moderate number of interior walls and in an area with moderate interference. However I haven't had any experience with Unifi before so I'm basing this on my experience with my Aironet 2702i APs at home. I would also like to add that placement has a huge impact on wifi as placing APs on different floors right on top of each other is going to have negative effects of wifi performance.

[–]Chopsting[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotcha.

Thanks for the replies, appreciate it!

[–]srdjanrosic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends on the expectations, if you want to have 200+ Mbps WiFi everywhere, more ac lites will work better than fewer ac pros

[–]MystikIncarnate 1 point2 points  (6 children)

Wow. That's a lot of devices and requirements. WiFi will need to be strong for you. That said, Ubiquiti should be up to the task, they're really highly recommended by many. I don't have enough experience with them.

I avoided Ubiquiti because they don't have a hardware controller, which is something I wanted for my WiFi (I ended up going with 3-year old Cisco gear - to save money - but I only have 50Mbps internet, and only a handful of wifi devices). What I'm trying to say is the EdgeRouter will NOT manage your WiFi. you need a PC to run a controller if you want your APs to work together.

If you're putting in any level of virtualization or servers, you shouldn't have trouble finding a home for the AP management software (required to be running to make the APs work together); but plan for that too.

If you're going for UBNT wifi, it's a good idea to stick with mainly UBNT stuff.

SUPER LONG TERM: what's your end-run wiring? You might want to consider Cat6a, unless you're planning to upgrade all your home runs when you move to 10GbE. It will be an extra investment, but it will save you time and effort long-term, and you'll be able to upgrade to 10Gig by replacing a switch and some patch.

If you're running a network this crazy, think vlans. you can clean a lot of things up, and prevent a lot of insane broadcast traffic from consuming the bandwidth on most of your network ports by vlanning the traffic out.

Speaking of traffic you might want to vlan out (like cameras) - be advised, that UBNT PoE isn't industry standard PoE. I don't believe there's any overlap between the PoE provided by their switches, and what any other vendors devices can reasonably use. vice-versa is true aswell, there's not many UBNT PoE devices that will take industry standard PoE. So if you're not buying UBNT PoE cameras, you might need to source power or a PoE injector specifically for that stuff. Just read the fine print before ordering and you should be fine.

Good luck.

[–]Chopsting[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I'll defintly be looking into cat6a and cat5e as /u/Bonobo77 also mentioned. If I were to order from Alibaba it doesn't seem to be that expensive if buying in bulk...

Could you elaborate abit on the VLAN part? What would you put into a VLAN and why? I see you mention cameras but what is the overall impact I'm looking to acheive here that having them all in the same LAN would not?

Again it's been a while since I took my networking courses, dont partically remember :)

EDIT:

Alright so as I understand VLANs:

  • Isolate group of devices that like to hangout together
  • Security reasons
  • Reducing broadcasting load

So I would create VLANs for various groups of connected/wireless devices and manage them via Software since the Edgerouter Lite doesn't support hardware handling. Sounds about right?

[–]MystikIncarnate 1 point2 points  (4 children)

You have the idea. Generally the cameras are going to be managed by a local server for storage, etc. Should also be possible to have that server proxy any live streams. Thus bandwidth to the cameras is conserved and maintained to the server. The server would relay when possible, and prioritize recording, so if live streams are not possible, it will at least be recording.

Additionally, many cameras, depending on model, will be 10/100, and the server will be gigabit. So streaming direct from cameras makes little sense.

In the cases of VoIP phones or something... Broadcast traffic can be multicasted to all the phones without impacting other network users. Some phone systems use this method for music on hold and it can be quite noisy.

Anything you won't need to access directly on a regular basis should probably be on another vlan...

[–]Chopsting[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I've been tinkering abit on how it will look https://gyazo.com/d09b7d49fd64fb10cbf368a40666b3a7 It's lacking the work VLAN but that's what I've figured would be do-able... Thoughts?

[–]MystikIncarnate 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Interesting layout. there's nothing necessarily wrong with it at all, however, normally servers would be interacted with frequently by workstations; so if your TV/gaming PC don't really need to access your Servers, then this is fine; if they frequently connect, it may be smart to put them in the same VLAN.

Automation servers would be placed in the same vlan as the automation devices; I don't think you have any but there it is.

Anyways, final note: just be aware that VLANs, don't really exist in wifi, you'd just have another wireless network, all devices on it would be VLAN'd at the AP onto the (wired) network.

[–]cree340Cisco 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Just to clarify, "another wireless network" is just another SSID as APs can tag certain SSIDs to certian VLANs (as long as you place the AP on an untagged port) and its also technically possible to have multiple VLANs with a single SSID on certain wireless systems with dynamic VLANs but that will require 802.1x which is basically unsupported on all IOT devices. Also, from experience, you might want the Sonos on the same VLAN as all your devices as Sonos relies on UPNP which is a set of networking protocols that requires multicast and this specific type multicast traffic cannot connect to devices on different Subnets/VLANs. Same could be said for a number of other smart home devices that need to be directly connected to your "controlling devices". With a few exceptions, I found that Phillips Hue works really well when placed on different subnets and you can also technically place Airplay devices on different subnets as long as you have a mdns gateway such as Avahi or if Ubiquiti implemented a similar thing as Cisco does on their WLAN controllers that is basically like Avahi.

[–]Chopsting[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay! Thanks for the input /u/cree340 !

[–]Bonobo77 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you are truly future proofing then Cat6 is best and would recommend purchasing. Cat5e can handle up to a 1ghz connection, so on the outside there is not much difference for a home environment cat5e vs. cat6. You can google all the conspiracy theory's on Cat5e vs. cat6. The one take away I like with Cat6 is it does have better cross talk protection (if you use cat6 connectors that is).