Upgrading My Home Network: A Journey Towards Seamless WiFi

Recently my router died after serving a good life (RIP Asus RT-AC5300) so I had to rapidly upgrade my home network. I used this as an opportunity to look to create a proper WiFi 6 network, to try to completely eliminate bufferbloat and to move to PoE switches. After some research and discussion with friends I ended up with the following equipment:

• Dream Machine Pro. The standard Dream Machine would also be fine but I wanted more ethernet ports and didn’t want to have to upgrade again
• 2x Ubiquity 8 port PoE Switches. I got the 60W versions
• 2x U6-Pro APs

My house is already wired so I could distribute the switches and APs at strategic locations. I put one AP in the lounge room and another in the leisure room upstairs which split both the floors and locations and this gives great coverage everywhere in the house from my testing.

In terms of the network setup itself, I opted for something simple:

1. Core Network
2. IoT Network (Core can talk to IoT but not vice-versa)
3. Guest Network (all clients are isolated from one another)

So far I haven’t changed much from the UDM Pro itself except to enable SQM for bufferbloat. By setting the bandwidth maximums conservatively (about 20% lower than true maximum) I was able to achieve A+ rating on waveform bufferbloat test.

Results:

1. About 500-600mbps down from the internet using Wi-Fi
2. Whole house on GbE generally, except for some devices that do not support it
3. A+ bufferbloat on tests
4. Really neat features like being able to teleport into the local network
   1. Generally, my preference is tailscale for this but it’s a nice backup option
5. Awesome features to track clients and their usage, IPS/IDS etc.

Overall the Ubiquity gear is expensive but it so far seems rock solid, high performance and looks nice. I resisted for a long time investing properly in the home network but it’s nice to have solid Wi-Fi everywhere.

Next things to do: I have integrated with Home Assistant but I found the entities are extremely granular, down to each individual device network usage. I wanted something simpler to show the overall bandwidth, but it seems you need to enable SNMP for this (which I would prefer not to do). Still need to do more research on this.