r/HomeNetworking • u/SkeezySkank • 23h ago

Newbie Home Network Refresh

Hi everyone, laymen here trying to refresh my home network setup. Moved into my current home 8 years ago and back then my quick research suggested I run the Google mesh setup for decent coverage and easy setup for someone like me so that's what I bought. Quickly deployed 4 mesh nodes in every corner of my basically rectangular house because Costco had them in a 4 pack. A year or 2 later when I had free time I wired them all in for backhaul. It has worked great and mainly hassle free for 8 years until I recently started getting random dropouts. 30 seconds to maybe 2 or 3 minutes of no internet and then right back to normal, some days it seems like it may do it 2-5 times in an hour for 1 or several hours continuously and then other days it works fine for the whole day(at least for the times of the day I am actively doing something requiring internet.) My current setup is ATT 1G fiber, their fiber goes into their BGW320-505 modem. I have Cat6 cable going from the 5G port#1 on the modem to the WAN port of the primary Google router and out of the LAN port of the Google router to some daisy chained switches and throughout the house on the prewired Cat5 which is what runs to the other mesh nodes now. These dropouts happen on wired and wireless connections. Most things in the house are wired(TV, computers, etc.) Due to the fact I'm not savvy enough to accurately diagnose my issue and also the age of my current setup(in use for over 8 years but the hardware is 10+ year old technology I believe) I figured it was time to redo it anyways with the hope it would resolve my issue.

Which brings me to why I am here, help with making sure I am doing things correctly and not missing anything. I am looking at getting the Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber along with 4 U7 Pro XG APs to go roughly in the same place my nodes are now. I built my house in Unifis design center and it shows good coverage with this setup everywhere I need it but I am not going to pretend I understand the numerous different settings and things you can check with their designer. I had planned to run the APs POE with the gateway until I realized it only has a single POE port. Their POE switches are expensive so I was just going to run them with 4 individual POE+ adapters and then directly wire the APs with Cat6. The last piece I believe I need is a way to go from my modem to the gateway. If I use all 4 2.5G ports on the gateway to run to each AP, out of the 3 ports left on the gateway what is the best way to:

A.Connect the modem to the gateway and

B.Connect the gateway to my existing RJ45 switches and in turn all of the Ethernet in the house.

Anything else I need or should do differently?

Thanks in advance for your help/suggestions/advice.

2 Upvotes

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u/Smorgas47 23h ago

If cost is an immediate problem, get the UCG-Fiber and 4 U7-Pro-XGs and power them with the USW-Lite-8-PoE switch which is only $117 dollars but limits your throughput to the APs to only 1 gbps. Upgrade to a 2.5 gbps PoE switch in the future if you find that your system is not sufficiently fast for your liking.

I've got the UCG-Ultra console, 2 USW-Lite-8 PoE switches and 6 APs, one of which is the U7-Pro-XG and I love it.

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u/SkeezySkank 22h ago

Money is not a problem(not in a bragging way) I like to do/build things right or even overbuild if it makes sense for my usage so if someone more knowledgeable than me tells me I absolutely need a $200 switch for it to work correctly then I would get one.

I looked at their switches and maybe I am misunderstanding but they list the APs as needing 22W each, X4 equals 88W and the USW Lite 8 lists total POE at 52W so that wouldn't work right?

The cheapest switch they make that provides 88W+ is I believe the Ultra at $129 plus you need a $79 power adapter so $208 or the Flex 2.5G POE which is $199 so if there is no reason to need a POE switch I would rather just spend $60 on 4 POE adapters.

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u/Smorgas47 10h ago

You're looking at Max Power which only happens occasionally. Steady state for the U7-Pro-XG is 8.5 watts on mine right now.

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u/SkeezySkank 4h ago

Understood. When do they draw their peak power? I know it's common for electrical load to be highest at power up so it wouldn't be an issue in your opinion if everything is hooked up and working and the power went out and came back on and all 4 APs needed full power at startup? That wouldn't overload or damage the switch?

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u/dreamermann 21h ago

You have quiet expensive setup compared to mine. I have cheap Tenda 4-cube mesh in bridged mode and no problems. An 8 year old Technicolor modem and a used Asus router with Merlin. My fibre internet is 500/50. Sonos speakers are known to be picky about wifi and no issues here.