![]() ![]() The house is large - 500 square meters is 5,381 square feet - and it's spread out over 3 levels.Let me clarify a few important points here: I'd had a bunch of chats with people online about this but it was tricky in short Twitter discussions so I wrote the whole thing up in a Gist about building Troy's network which I'll embed here as it explains the background and design decisions really well: Requirements and designīecause not having an all-in-one device was a bit foreign to me, I decided I needed to crowdsource some help on this one. Hard-wiring some bits? Another device.Īll these devices take some planning so let's get onto how I put it all together. Instead of being a single purpose Homer, it's multiple individual vehicles: one is a two seat Italian supercar, another is a people mover, then there's a track day special and yes that means more things but they each do what they do extremely well without the compromises of multi-purposing. Go down the Ubiquiti path and you're buying different bits for different purposes. For example, the Linksys I was replacing is The Homer: The consumer gear crams everything into one box that tries to do everything which you then sit in a corner and it's "job done". It's stuff that has purpose.īut here's the thing - it's all pretty single-purpose stuff too. There's a lot of gear there you'll find in an office or commercial environment and it's bereft of pretty colours, gamer-style antennas and other warm, fuzzy, touchy-feely things. Ubiquiti thingsįirst and foremost, Ubiquiti doesn't fit the usual consumer-grade mould, for example, they make gear like this:įor when you absolutely, positively need to stream data at 450Mbps over a 30km range! It's full on gear and when you browse through their product page you get a sense of who they target. Let me share what I got, how it works and how it's finally solved my long-running wifi dramas. Plus, I frankly just had to get over my sense of loss aversion - it is what it is with the Linksys devices, now what's the smartest thing to do? It was Ubiquiti. But the more I thought about it and particularly as I looked into it, Ubiquiti made a lot more sense. Admittedly, this bugged me because I didn't want to buy new stuff, I wanted the stuff I already had to work properly. There's also extensive evidence out there that this is just what many Linksys products do and the more I looked into it, the less convinced I was that it was ever going to be acceptable whilst I had Linksys devices in the house.īut I also got a resounding chorus of people telling me to just "do it properly" and go buy Ubiquiti bits. No, no, a hundred times no to both - if I buy a product then I expect it to work as advertised and not need to implement hacks to keep it alive. After venting on Twitter, I got a variety of responses including that I should install the open source dd-wrt firmware or that I should buy a power adaptor that can automatically cycle the power every night. Wired connections were fine and power-cycling the router would fix it, but every time a page was a bit slow I'd be wondering if it was cactus again. There's 95% of my connection speed gone for no apparent reason. Instead of 40Mbps down per the tweet above, it'd drop to less than 2. I'd be working away on the laptop on wifi and the connection would just drop to almost nothing. It was like "here's your router, uh, good luck!"Īnd then the Linksys started misbehaving. I had Billion devices before Linksys and I don't think I ever saw a firmware update over many years which worried me not just because I'm sure there was broken stuff in there, but because it was never evolving. Also the same approach to updating the thing: you're not going to see many changes to the firmware. Same basic interface, same simple settings, same "just get it set up then never look at it again" paradigm. The first thing that got me with these devices is that it felt like nothing had changed since the very first wireless access points I had over a decade ago. Now maybe if I was your everyday garden variety home user it would have been ok, but I'm not and if you're here on my blog reading this then you're probably not either. They were well-reviewed and I figured I'd put them at opposite ends of the place, throw in a couple of switches as well and we'd be all good. I bought 2 Linksys WRT1900AC wireless routers when I moved interstate into a big house just over a year ago. Really disappointed with the WRT1900AC wireless routers I bought a year ago, continually degrade speed and need a reset /TsEzdiHLMs- Troy Hunt September 22, 2016 Plus, I want to be happy and few things make me less happy than computer bits going wrong: Particularly in my independent life, it really can be that black and white - if I can't work, it costs me money. I'm increasingly of the view that both my time and my sanity are worth more and more as the years progress. ![]()
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