>HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them.. Au contraire! I got tired of the refrain "are you messing with the network again?" in the evenings when the neighbors are all streaming Netflix and crowding the airwaves, so I installed several low power UI APs around the house and and popped my own DNS and devices to a separate VLAN. No more complaints :) I do wish Unifi offered more configuration in the ad-blocking department, but I'm hesitant to inflict anything but the most vanilla deployment on the remainder of the household..
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TP-Link bribe/lobbying in 3, 2, 1... I recently bought a TP-Link Omada ceiling mountable access point, which has been working great. My Ubiqiti APs are due for an upgrade and the Omada (for a separate network), at half the price of roughly equivalent Ubiqiti APs, is impressing me so far. (The Ubiqiti's have been rock solid for years though, no complaints whoatsoever). Netgear (US) and D-Link (Taiwan) were consistently disappointmenting enough that I swore off them many years ago, and buyers-remorse-PTSD prevents me from reconsidering them ever again.
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I haven't gone quite this crazy, but I do have three SSIDs broadcast from my UniFi APs - my main network (WPA3 PSK), a guest one, and a devices network for IoT devices. All these are on different subnets/VLANs and firewalled off from each other. A lot of the IoT stuff doesn't work with WPA3 or 5GHz, so it's useful even for that reason, but the main thing is screening them off from everything else. I am setting up a NUC as a little home Proxmox server (for some other stuff mainly) but for "fun" I can actually see myself setting up a Samba 4 Active Directory domain controller and hooking FreeRADIUS up to that to do Enterprise for my main SSID, but we'll see!
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I think it depends largely on age - “new builds” (1980s onwards) often have a brick partition wall down the middle and the rest plaster/wood stud. The last couple of houses (significantly older) I’ve lived in have been pretty much all brick walls. We’ve got 3 UniFi APs downstairs here, 2 up. There are still things on the periphery that only just cling on, and when you’ve got stuff like that it takes a lot of airtime.
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Just as a note: you can easily configure AREDN to not use non-ISM channels. Regarding custom firmware: yeah, but it's really openwrt with some CGI scripts. If you're not trying to specifically join their preexisting networks, you can accomplish everything it does off of vanilla openwrt with not much effort. I think understanding what's actually going on under the hood in networking terms is valuable enough to skip the preconfiguration, though I guess that depends on the exact deployment case. If this isn't intended to be used militarily in any way and is just putting up infra in rear areas, maybe that doesn't matter. This post ended up a bit more negative than I intended, so I should say that I have successfully used AREDN (or similarly configured openwrt) on Ubiquiti APs with yagis to do more or less what the OP is asking for, and it works pretty well. This is overall a good suggestion.
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I second this. I went all in on the dream machine and some of its parts and it failed in an unrecoverable way, I sent it in for repairs; and it failed again in a different unrecoverable way. I just use the crappy Comcast router with a ubiquiti AP now.
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As it happens, I'm also on a Unifi AP, so that's curious. Would not hesitate to assign blame there... Although, I have long since abandoned their automatic firmware updates which has really helped with stability, so I'm not sure what would've changed on the AP _recently_.
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Interesting, I have 3 edgerouters and UniFi AP which have been trucking for the better part of a decade. Can you point me in the direction for sources for their EoL issues? I am about to double down on Ubiquiti as the networking backbone and security cameras for my new house, so I have a special interest in this currently.
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I have a UniFi EdgeRouter-X and two UniFi APs. I'm happy with the APs satisfied with the ER-X. Once nice feature on the ER-X is their Smart QoS; you specify your broadband UL/DL rate and the router does a good job of preventing single devices from monopolizing your pipe. I've been looking into replacing my router with something that can host a VPN that I can connect to on the go. I don't think the ER-X can fully utilize my broadband with L2TP/IPsec or OpenVPN so I'm looking for something that can run Wireguard. Right now I'm eyeing a PC Engine APU2 [0] running OpenWRT. I think it's powerful enough to meet my needs and would also function as a pi-hole. This setup will require more setup than the ER-X but it also is more customizable. My UniFi APs are upstairs and downstairs. Since my place isn't wired I am using some MoCA devices [1] over coax to get everything connected. [0] https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2d4.htm [1] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B013J7O3X0