I got 99 problems but my WiFi ain't one

I just got two Asus XT8 wifi 6 boxes and another XD4 for the garage / garden. Covers a massive area at super high speeds. Managing 6-700mbps on a 1gig line pretty much everywhere in the house / garden now.

Coming from a set up Google Wifi pucks, there's no comparison.

TP-Link Deco

I think this is winning.

I've reverted to Unifi access points and running cable the full length of the house. But the Amplifi mesh worked well enough. Though I think TP-Link is great, more reasonably priced, and way more people have that.

I use the Unifi APs, the biggest issue I am having is finding any of the entry level stuff in stock!

Any recommendations for a switch with at least a couple of PoE ports (for unifi APs)? Doesn't need any fancy management features, just to be reliable.

I use a TP link one to run my unifi APs, haven't had any issues at all.

Cheers. Do you know which model, there looks to be a lot of slightly different ones.

This is the one I have, might have been surpassed by now, but not had any issues.

Cheers. That was the one I was looking at.

I went for the TP-Link Deco P9 in the end, thanks all. Immediately seen a bump back up to full speed, and I feel like the network isn't lagging so much in general, so it might be coping with the mountain of devices I have connected a lot better too.

Just built a garden office which is about 25 metres from the router in the house. We have an ethernet cable running from the house down to the office, what do I need to transmit the internet from that wire to the office wirelessly?

Sorry if badly worded question, there's so many different products out there and its confusing to know what's what.

Edit: Would something like this work? https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-WR841N-300Mbps-Wireless-Supports/dp/B001FWYGJS/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2TSZ2TUN8FRY6

A WiFi access point to turn the data in the ethernet cable into wireless internet.

A router won't work, you need to plug the ethernet cable into your router at the house end and have an access point at the other.

Last time I checked the forum recommended one was the UAP-AC-LITE (https://eu.store.ui.com/products/unifi-ac-lite) or the Access Point WiFi 6 Lite (https://eu.store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-wireless/products/unifi-ap-6-lite) if you want the latest standard/a bit faster.

Other WiFi access points are no doubt available but won't be as good ;)

Having followed the forum unifi advice from above. I am very much in the system now with the switches and cameras. It all works great!

Tell me about the cameras.

I've been using the Google Nest cameras, but ugh... they're not great. Lower resolution than most competitors, the IR / night vision isn't particularly great, and one of my indoor cameras has failed with it's normal camera mode being a magenta / pink colour (apparently due to high temperatures, but it sits next to the thermostat when shows it never got about 28'c).

Been considering a move to the Ubiquiti Protect cameras, but hesitating as I don't know how well they work.

Looking for:

• Indoor use
  
• Good resolution
  
• Good night vision capability
  
• Easy remote access
  
• Not too big / ugly
  
  

How have you found them to be?

I'll pop a post together on my lunch to give you my experience.

It might be worth having a switch at the end in the office too, so that you can have ethernet to devices if you need (and have a wireless access point as well).

Here's a switch / AP combo on ebay. POE switches are useful for cameras and the like.

I have 2 ethernet cables heading to my garden room, connected to an 8 port switch (one is for redundancy, in case fences blow over).

That is connected to a wireless AP, ethernet ports in the office part of the building, a couple of other nerdy things, and a couple spare.

Ubiquiti Protect cameras

Subbing with interest, as I picked up a decently priced DreamMachine, so it should (hopefully) be straightforward to work with the protect cameras.

I looked at the Unifi stuff before. A lot of it was out of stock and the reviews didn't seem that impressive for the price.

I've settled on Eufy for the moment which seems decent.

For your use though I'd be tempted to go with some generic network cameras and Ispy or Camlytics or MotionEyeOS. That was my plan until I found there are barely any outdoor cameras available for such a set up.

I already own the controller, Protect, and lots of disk space.

The cameras all seem to be in stock, and saving my money on the Nest subscription (and not introducing another subscription) whilst gaining privacy (it's under my control)... all feels like a nice win.

Of course there's an argument that having the video stored on-site isn't as good... i.e. if the place burns down and I want the video to support an insurance claim, then the video will have been destroyed along with the property, etc.

I'm at least interested to learn about the Ubiquiti cameras, and perhaps experiment with one (to replace the one that only films in Magenta).

Makes sense if you've already got the stuff but worth pointing out that Eufy can store directly to Micro SD cards in each camera or a local NAS and either option requires no subscription.

They're also HomeKit compatible which means iCloud storage with no subscription.

I should add this means I would need to achieve a Nest integration with Home Assistant... as at the moment the killer feature for acquiring the Google Nest cameras was the Google Protect fire alarm... when the fire alarm goes, the cameras within the house all turn on even if they were turned off beforehand.

Sorry for the late reply had a busy lunch.

So my experience with the unifi cameras has been overall good. I must say upfront that they work for me and obviously your mileage may vary.

I came to it with 2 unifi access points. One for the garden and one for the house. Everything worked great but part of the influence that pushed me down the unifi camera route was something to run a controller on full time and have more data and settings to play with. Previously I was running the web controller as and when I needed to tweek something.

I started down the path at looking for dream machine pro to run everything, add some cameras that id always planned on getting from some brands range and get some control over firewall/routing.

After my research coming up less than favourable for the firewall side of unifi I went for a cloud key gen 2 plus, 2x G4 bullet and 3x G3 flex. All linked up with an 8 POE lite and a 16 POE lite switch, to power it all and connect it up.

I got lucky with the stocking and got it all in one go. Originally struggled a little to adopt everything into my existing set up but as I only had 2 access points I didn't fight too hard and instead started again and reset the APs and rebuilt it all around the cloud key. Installed the apps on my phone which has been great compared to the web controller.

I have the cloud key set up in my loft of a 1930 semi with the 16 POE lite feeding all the cameras. I have one G4 bullet to the front of the house and one 2 the side as it's a corner plot, this give me about 160 degrees of visibility of the accessible part of my property. Quality wise I have them set to 1080 as I'm running the original 1Tb HDD that comes with the cloud key. I find this adequate as it's good enough to indetify people at the 9ft install height and I can record for about 10 days with the front set to constant recording and the other 3 cameras I'm using set to motion (note 3 other cameras).

The quality does degrade if you zoom in obviously as it's digital not optical so it's important to take into account your field of view when purchasing. My use case is partly detterant/peace of mind. Partly checking on couriers and local foxes. I'm not interested in reading registration plates etc.

I find the night time IR to be surprisingly good for a built in unit. The front camera illuminates my 5mx10m drive completely. The side has a bigger patch to light up and the angle needs a tweek as it is slightly catching the street light in its periphial and isn't as illuminated as a result.

The 3 G3 Flex cameras - for the price and the size these are fab. I have a baby and a 3 year old and have integrated these as baby cams fitted in the corner above the door of 2x double bedrooms. They give a good viewing angle of the majority of the room of everything other than directly below. The IR is enough to light the whole room and the detail at 1080 is good enough for my use case.

We had a medical thing with my eldest which whilst she has recovered from we as parents arent over so a couple times a night will flick the app on, check on her and close it. Using the digital zoom feature, zooming in about 5 metres to a face is clear enough for us to tell everything is fine whilst the image is a bit noisy at night.

I'm really happy with the whole lot, mostly because of how well Integrated it all is. I have my network app and protect app and can control everything from my phone. It looks slick and it always works. I am reasurred that everything is local and tucked away in the loft. I don't worry so much about the crime aspect as I live in a quiet postcode but like to see what is going on around the property when away from home.

The bad bits.

I'm sure you can find better equipment for less money. I didn't really look into it due to the integration to my set up. I don't have a 'smart home' there is zero Amazon/Google/Facebook type IoT in my house except phones which are pretty locked down. So there is nothing to bring me towards that side of integration.

Usual unifi setup things. As mentioned before my decision to start again as I was adding more than I had made it easier but I am sure it would have took a while to set up without.

The note about 2 camera above - I bought a pack of 3 G3 flex as they had the 3 pack in stock, I only had immediate use for 2 but planned to maybe add the 3rd to cover the rear of the property at a later date. I adopted the camera with the rest, tested it and then left if for a few months unused. I recently came to get it out as I wanted to temporarily rig it up somewhere else in the house and it wouldn't display on the protect app.

I think the camera fell behind a few updates whilst disconnected and had issues trying to get back up to speed with the protect software. I tried to reset, pin hole and re adopt and I think the camera has bricked it's self as it's completely invisible to the network/software. I filed an RMA request to ubiqiti really hoping for some way to reset at home. I didn't get a response for around 30 days, in the end they have approved an RMA but I have to post it back to Czech Republic at my cost. Which is where it is now. It's not ideal and getting support is very tricky.

If you want to know anything more specific let me know and I'll try to answer it.

This is a good review, thanks for writing it up.

Agreed on the "nothing's perfect" vibe here, it's always about the trade-offs.

John Lewis are replacing my faulty Nest Camera so I'll carry on with them a while longer, but your review is interesting enough that I may just buy a single camera to do a comparison against the Nest ones for the unzoomed image and field-of-vision for the one that I have in my living room that I'm unsatisfied with.

Any ideas why my Unifi controller topology map no longer shows APs and devices connected to them, only the devices directly wired to my USG (via a switch)?

This may have changed when I stopped using a tough switch (it died) to connect the APs but the Tough switch wasn't on the Unifi controller anyway so not sure that would make the difference.

Did you have an assigned IP for the APs, or DHCP? Can you see them on the network at all?

My usual approach is to SSH to them, unadopt them via the command line, them adopt them again in the controller.

Misread. Soz