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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

i agree with you, but after a decade of routers and openwrt i decided to go with ubiquiti. it got to a point where the router hardware just wasn’t good enough, no matter the software. so i got myself a dream machine, a pro switch with poe and an AP and i have never looked back.

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Same here. The brand isn’t necessarily important, but rather the idea that the “router” and “access point” don’t need to be bundled in the same physical box. For most people, their incoming internet line comes into their house at an atrocious point for radio transmission and reception.

By separating the router from the Wi-Fi access point, even if you only use one AP, you’re able to put the AP in the best place for full coverage. I hired an electrician to run the cable for me when I bought a house about 10 years ago- he charged a reasonable price, cut a minimum number of holes in the wall, and I was left with a cable in the center ceiling of the house which gave me excellent service throughout with a ceiling mounted AP.

Since then I’ve added on to the house and run additional wires to more ceiling mounted APs to get consistent 5ghz only access throughout the house. Rock solid and never have to think about it (although it is always tempting to tweak)

How's the range?

I have d-link mesh satellites, and needed 4 around the house just so I didn't have any blindspots. To show how bad they are, when my laptop is within a metre of the d-link main satellite, I get the full 150Mbs of my upstream, but 2 metres away but with line of sight, it drops to ~130Mbs. Leave the room, and it's about 90Mbs :(

I was hoping something like Ubiquiti would be something like the full upstream speed without the horrible dropout-per-metre I'm getting right now. Happy to get a few of them in mesh (if that's how they work) if I can get full speed from my office which is curretly 4 hops away.

i do not recommend mesh. mesh networks halve your bandwidth. if you can just use an ethernet cable to the next access point. the good news is that all their APs use power-over-ethernet, so you just need an ethernet cable, no sockets.

https://store.ui.com/products/u6-lr-us this single long range one should cover most of your home (depending on walls etc). and if it's not enough, just get another one from this list: https://www.ui.com/wi-fi#compare

of course, if you can't/won't use ethernet cables for your APs, you can try this mesh: https://store.ui.com/products/access-point-wifi-6-mesh

as a reference, a single long range AP covered a 7 bedroom house (wood), with just a couple of minor blind spots. but for a double wall brick house we needed 3x U6 lite.

> mesh networks halve your bandwidth

Oh. I actually didn't know this. Damn.

> power-over-ethernet

I used to use PoE and was getting great speeds everywhere in the house, but then I got solar panels and an inverter. Turns out, that a lot of people ended up having the same issues as me on whirlpool.net.au :(

But yeah, I've also considered getting an electrician in and wiring some rooms with CAT-6 and go wireless AP in that room. But sounds like it's still going to be the same as mesh doing this and halving my speed?

Awesome! Thank you for the links. I'll check them out!

> But yeah, I've also considered getting an electrician in and wiring some rooms with CAT-6 and go wireless AP in that room. But sounds like it's still going to be the same as mesh doing this and halving my speed?

as long as there is an ethernet cable from your switch/router to the AP, then speed will not halve. speed halves only when using mesh.

> Awesome! Thank you for the links. I'll check them out!

no problem. i started out my career in networking, and have always kept a soft spot for it even thou i'm doing software these days.

the minimum you need is:

- 1x Dream Machine (Pro or SE doesn't matter)

- 1x Access Point (could be long range, could be lite, depends on your needs)

you plug in the internet and the AP into the Dream Machine and that's about it.

from this barebones setup you can add further hardware depending your needs. for example I've added a PoE switch and another smaller non-poe switch (that funnily enough is powered by the other PoE switch).

aha! Sweet, thanks... ok, looks like this is the way to go!

Edit: to be honest, I'm actually excited to try this out now. I've been on bad wireless for at least 4 years

You might look at some of the replies in this thread. The poster you’re replying to has an outdated view of how mesh networks work with modern hardware.

Mesh networks can use Ethernet as backhaul and they can also use dedicated radios on 6GHz for backhaul. I’m using a mix of both (still have a couple I need to run Ethernet to) and it’s fantastic.

> Mesh networks can use Ethernet as backhaul and they can also use dedicated radios on 6GHz band for backhaul. I’m using a mix of both (still have a couple I need to run Ethernet to) and it’s fantastic.

I wouldn’t recommend wireless backhaul to people who have bad experience with WiFi. Some people have bad WiFi because their (older?) buildings have problems with wireless in general: I am not saying they live in a faraday cage but still their if their WiFi isn’t great, wireless backhaul won’t be either. Go wired if you have a choice.

This has a lot to do with the construction layout and materials used.

Thus, in older houses, WiFi signal may not be great, and brick walls will make wiring the house an absolute pain.

I have seen some people dropping wire outside of the house, which is not great either (surges can and will happen).

> Go wired if you have a choice.

For sure, that's why I mentioned that I'm still in the process of switching over to pure ethernet for backhaul.

That said, if you have enough nodes, 6GHz for backhaul works pretty nice right now. My home has concrete block exterior walls with some interior concrete and plaster walls and the nodes that use dedicated 6GHz for backhaul are doing just fine as is.

I would never consider 5GHz for backhaul, though.

FYI Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and Powerline adapters are two entirely different things.

lol, sorry I got mixed up. Yeah, I meant to say that EoP seems to drop out and lose bandwidth on my lines. For devices rated at 300Mbps, I'm getting about 19Mbps

If you happen to have existing coax cable runs in your house, you might look into MOCA. It's used by some modern cable tv boxes and similar devices to route ethernet packets over the existing coax cable.

It can be used on the same coax as is used for your cable modem, though if you can isolate the coax you want to use as an ethernet link, you might have better results.

I've used the competing standard DECA in the past, as it was significantly cheaper than MOCA about 5-8yrs ago ($25/unit vs $150/unit) but MOCA is now the much better option with it supporting GB speeds and pricing being down around ~$50/unit. I think the max speeds I saw over DECA was about 100Mbps, maybe 200Mbps on shorter runs.

>i do not recommend mesh. mesh networks halve your bandwidth. if you can just use an ethernet cable to the next access point. the good news is that all their APs use power-over-ethernet, so you just need an ethernet cable, no sockets.

Mesh dropping bandwidth is less of an issue these days as we have much more bandwidth and you are unlikely to run the largest channel width anyway, then newer solutions support mu-mimo with separate backhaul.

Proper mesh APs have a dedicated radio for AP-to-AP traffic. Unless traffic takes multiple mesh hops, bandwidth will not be affected.

Yeah. Unfortunately my office is 4 hops from the modem :facepalm:

Unfortunately Ubiquiti hardware is not "proper mesh," despite their advertising. They don't have a dedicated backhaul radio.

> mesh networks halve your bandwidth.

This is only true for single band networks. You can use one band as backhaul, another for AP, and still get ~300Mbps.

> of course, if you can't/won't use ethernet cables for your APs, you can try this mesh

All of the latest UniFi APs support meshing. Ubiquiti is not great at naming their products, apparently.

Also, I would advise against the LR. It does output more power and has a larger antenna than the lite, but there is little to it for indoors use, compared to the Pro, which I believe is cheaper and definitely is speedier.

> All of the latest UniFi APs support meshing. Ubiquiti is not great at naming their products, apparently.

good one, this is true, i was mistaken.

Depends what you mean by mesh. For me, the defining characteristic is better support for roaming/fast handoff, things like 802.11k and 802.11r.

Agreed it's best to connect the access points with Ethernet.

Note that 802.11r is only useful if you’re using WPA enterprise authentication (certificates and radius and all). Most home networks use WPA personal pre shared keys (aka here’s my Wi-Fi password).

802.11r accelerates the multi step handshake that you have to perform with WPA enterprise when you roam from one access point to another. There is a much shorter handshake for WPA personal so there is no advantage to enabling 802.11r if you’re not using Enterprise auth.

Not entirely true: for WPA2 it is the case that all APs and clients use the same key, but even in that case, 11r adds mobility domain and FT-PSK and results in more devices having better roaming.

For WPA3-SAE and WPA3-OWE it is required as each client has a different (session) key.

Interesting- thanks for the correction. I’m off to read more!

Any thoughts on MoCA? I've got gigabit fttp and I need two APs for coverage. Place is already wired with coax, so hoping to utilize that.

Thats just wifi dude... how it works. Very bad, prefer cable. Some new gizmo wont magically improve physics. Try homeplug if you cant pull cable.

I see you got recommended Ubiquity. That is good. Better than consumer grade shit.

*Downvoted for telling the truth about how shit WiFi is, classic HN. You are mostly programmers lol. "WiFi works lule" For some Netflix sure.

Yeah, I've tried tp-link, d-link, netgear (consumer), and they're all really bad. Each time I think I've found the silver bullet, but I keep hearing how good Ubiquity is. I know they're not defying physics, but I'm sure that as they aimed at commercial then I'll hopefully be getting something way better than what I'm getting now.

I think this plus laying cable should last me another 10-20 years

In my neck of the woods (France), Ubiquity is fairly expensive. I've had good results with a cheapish (~100 €) netgear "business" access point, the wax214.

It supports poe, wifi ax (but only on 5 GHz), wpa 3 and can broadcast 4 separate networks, each on its own vlan (but it doesn't do any routing). It's been great for random iot junk that I don't want on my main network.

Routing is handled by an old HP elitedesk I've saved from the bin at work.

Yes Netgear prosafe gear is great too, even unmanaged. Anything made for business is going to be more solid than comsumer stuff.

"You are mostly programmers" is not quite the insult that you think it to be.

This programmer's task for the weekend is to buy a couple of cheap second-hand Ethernet switches, by the way, as part of an on-going effort to switch to networking infrastructure that doesn't compete with at least 13 of my neighbours. (-:

Good you follow my advice! Sooner better than later! Hopefully you won't annoy people with shit wifi anymore.

> "WiFi works lule" For some Netflix sure.

… which is about the most bandwidth intensive application most households ever use.

Latency. Latency. Video calls, gaming etc. Ethernet is best.

My homeplug setup (yes, same phase) was even less reliable than WiFi for me in my small townhome. Ymmv. Got Ethernet everywhere now.

Definitely don’t have the backhaul be over wifi as it severely impacts your speeds.

If you can’t get CAT6 where you need it, I have found MOCA to Ethernet adapters work well. Something like this. https://a.co/d/6FYGrga

If COAX is not available, I have also had a good experience with Powerline to Ethernet adapters. https://a.co/d/ddGHPOG

If you live in the US and your house was built in the past 20 years or so, check if you have old school phone jacks around. Many contractors took a “short cut” and ran dedicated cat5 cable to each of those wall ports instead of daisy chaining cat3 (probably was cheaper to buy cat5 in bulk).

Take the face plate off your phone jack and if you see a wire with four pairs of wires inside, only two connected to the jack, you may be in luck. I had rented a few townhomes which were like that, enabling me to build out a simple wired network without modifying or drilling at all.

Can confirm, this was the exact situation in my 2004-built townhome. Everything came into my bedroom closet. Learned how to terminate Ethernet, stuck a switch in there, and had a great home net.

Yeah, I've already cut all the phone lines since there was a tonne of noise when I was with ADSL. I've now got fibre into a closet which is connected straight to a modem and switch... I'll be getting an electrician to CAT6 from the switch the the rest of the house and then AP from the terminals

Are you connecting clients to the AP on 2.4 or 5 GHz? I've found 2.4 to be much more resilient over distance and through obstacles.

Yeah, most of my devices these days are 5Ghz. I suspected either interference, or that shorter waves don't penetrate obstacles as well as longer waves, or it could be that my inner walls are made from lead.

I actually switched away from a UDM after finding out that I could only hit 500 Mbit/s uplink (out of ~930) due to a PPPoE performance bug as there's no hardware offloading and the old Cortex-A57 cores (in a SoC from a vendor now owned by Amazon, so extremely end-of-life) just couldn't handle that.

Now I'm running a Turris Omnia with the bundled OpenWRT fork for router tasks and that seems to work fine.

Why do you need to use PPPoE? Is that an ISP requirement? It seems uncommon nowadays to need PPPoE.

Not sure about parent but here in Brazil all ISPs are still using PPPoE even under gigabit fiber, it's a miracle they can find a router that is able to push 800 Mbit under single-threaded pppoe. I've yet to find a router capable of doing proper gigabit that isn't some enteprise machine that costs me a car.

In cases like yours, the best solution is probably to get an x86-based fanless mini PC built around a laptop CPU. Those can hit quite high single-threaded speeds and have enough resources to handle not just your routing but also light duty as a home server. Chinese brands like Qotom and Topton and a bunch of others are selling them on AliExpress. They're several hundred dollars, but still cheaper than a lot of enterprise gear, and you can get them with 5 or 6 Ethernet interfaces. Getting a separate consumer WiFi access point/router with minimal CPU power of its own is usually cheaper than trying to add an AP-capable WiFi card to a mini PC.

And if you're going to do that, just run opnsense and (being essentially a distro of full blown BSD) have all the security, flexibility and scalability the machine can provide.

OPNsense security updates are delayed from FreeBSD ports by days to weeks.

It's not uncommon for DSL at all.

Yeah, but DSL won't have a problem with speed, and routers having too weak cpu to handle it.

GPON does.

A major Romanian ISP uses PPPoE and I'm tempted to say that another one does it too and they're offering gigabit speed.

Many fiber ISPs here in Europe seem to share the backend infrastructure between DSL and FTTH subscribers and that sadly also involves PPPoE encapsulation.

I’ve done the same.

It’s pretty stable but frustrations remain. Their Edge series are more powerful but the UI is painful and much must be done via the CLI. The Unifi line doesn’t support such things. For example, on an edge router it was fairly easy to make a rule saying “any port 53 traffic that isn’t coming from the Pihole, redirect back to the Pihole”.

The Dream Machine Pro isn’t 100% stable and occasionally requires the config to be reloaded. It’s support for more modern VPN types has been slow to materialise.

The UDMP has been vastly superior to my crappy IDP supplier routers.

Coincidentally I recently read somewhere that the Ubiquity firmware is actually based on OpenWRT.

I thought the Ubiquiti stuff used VyOS (fork of Vyatta)?

No, it's Vyatta-based.

The Unifi APs run OpenWRT. The Edgerouters and USGs run EdgeOS which is a fork of Vyatta 6.3. The Dream Machines run UnifiOS. I'm somewhat out of the Unifi loop these days as I only use the APs since my Edgerouter died in 2020, so am not up on what Unifi OS is based upon.

I won't say they never ran OpenWRT, but I've used several generations of Unifi AP's and every one used unifiOS which is based on Vyatta. If they did run OpenWRT, they haven't in well over a decade.

At least ac lite and nanohd are openwrt-based, so definitely less than a decade.

I suggest sshing to one of your Unifi APs and verifying. My APs are running firmware version bz.6.5.28 released 3 months ago. It is based upon OpenWRT 17.01.6 according to the /etc/openwrt_release file on the AP.

Below are the complete contents of the file:

DISTRIB_ID='LEDE'

DISTRIB_RELEASE='17.01.6'

DISTRIB_REVISION='r3979-2252731af4'

DISTRIB_CODENAME='reboot'

DISTRIB_TARGET='ar71xx/ubnt'

DISTRIB_ARCH='mips_24kc'

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION='LEDE Reboot 17.01.6 r3979-2252731af4'

DISTRIB_TAINTS='no-all mklibs busybox'

Edited: Added newlines for file content. I originally posted this from mobile in a hurry. Copy/pasting from the ssh session on my phone resulted in newlines being lost.

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