- There's something about growing a beard
that just makes you wanna
pick up a power tool and measuring tape and, you know,
upgrade your home WiFi.
Yeah, as it turns out
the beard really doesn't change much.
I'm still me.
And me hasn't upgraded the wireless access points
in my upstairs hallway for five years.
I mean, that kind of makes sense.
I did spend $1,000 on it with the intention of it being
my end game wireless networking solution
and it does still deliver
over 40 megabytes per second to nearby clients.
But, it also has next to
nothing in the way of management features
because I didn't buy the controller hardware
and poor reception in both my back and front yard.
Time to fix that up in a hurry.
Wish me luck.
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(upbeat music)
Step number one
is to sort through all this gear from Ubiquity.
Some of it, is for a future video
upgrading my home security setup.
Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that.
And some of it is for the WiFi upgrade today.
This right here is the BaseStation XG.
This is an outdoor rated access point,
that is freaking nuts.
It's got this shape because it's kind of more of
a directional style WiFi access point,
but I did not expect the size, or the weight.
It's got weather resistant plugs down here.
So that one's Gigabit and this one is 10 Gig?
Kind of speeds are they expecting you to get on this thing?
What are they expecting you to put this on?
Look at this.
Oh, I know what this is.
This is their power splitter, doodad thing.
So you put one AC input here,
and then they've got this special power connector for the,
like rack mount devices so you can power everything off of
one power port.
This we're gonna need today,
24 ports of Ubiquity Power over Ethernet goodness.
So we've got a couple of 10 Gig SFP plus ports.
So we can use that to go back to the main switch
and then the rest of them
are regular Gigabit Power over Ethernet.
So that'll handle our WiFi access points
and the new security cameras.
The Unified dream machine pro, this thing is super cool.
It's kind of like an all in one unit,
but not in a bad way.
So it's your router,
it's your security gateway,
it also has, check this out,
a three and a half inch drive for video recording
so it handles all of your security stuff
and you can use it as your cloud key.
So you don't need a dedicated VM
or a little dedicated dongle
in order to run and manage
all of your Ubiquity hardware.
This is what they've made such bold claims about.
This is the UAP XG,
but they say is the world's most powerful access point.
And they've got
comparative numbers right up on their website,
comparing two devices from brands like Ruckus
that I know from my experience
offer amazing WiFi performance.
Now this is not WiFi six.
Ubiquity actually has not jumped into the WiFi six game yet.
But, given that we don't actually
have any WiFi six devices in the house
since I'm back on my Note Nine again,
I'm not too worried about that now.
I am more interested in just having something
that's easy to manage and has
absolutely flawless coverage over my entire property.
More 10 Gig inputs, dang!
One of the big problems I have
is operating my smart garage door
from the end of my driveway and
well naturally, as soon as I go to demo
that it's not working very well,
I actually get a pretty solid result
at the end of the driveway here.
Now we'll see how the new one does, I guess.
The funny thing about this upgrade is that
after my first experience running Ubiquity products at home,
I swore I would never use them here again.
It was that notorious square access point
that they had a number of years ago,
that I had as many as three of, installed in my house
and I still couldn't get decent coverage.
This thing, with it's anywhere from 200 to 300
to even 400 megabit per second performance
all across my house,
was like a breath of fresh air.
Of course, I've always believed that
when you're choosing a product,
you should choose the multi product,
not the brand name.
So especially in light of the excellent experiences
we've had with Ubiquity gear at the office,
I'm giving them another shot here.
They acknowledge that that square AP was terrible.
Oh! 10 Gig, like what?
There, apparently Ubiquity has a mobile app for
a quick and dirty provisioning of a single AP.
But, since I'm gonna wanna be setting this up properly
in the longer term anyway,
I'm gonna go ahead and do the rack installs now.
Big old POE switch up next
and now the dream machine.
Man, I just realized
there's that 10 Gig port on the access point,
but the only 10 Gigs on the POE switch
are actually SFP plus, I can't even use them.
Honestly Gigabit is probably fine
with the number of clients we have here.
I doubt we'd max it out anyway.
I will definitely need a 10 Gig link
between this one and this one though,
but I don't have the cable here for that now
so I will deal with it later.
Now it's time to make a couple cables.
I need to go from my ISP provided modem
over to the WAN port on my router here.
And I also need to go from my router to my switch.
We're gonna go from the 10 Gig switch.
This is just temporary,
cause we'll put it in a different way later.
And then we'll go from the router over to the main switch.
Eventually, I'm gonna want a 10 Gig connection
between my POE switch here and my 10 Gig switch
and I'll just run that from like
here to here or something like that.
But, what I won't probably need to 10 Gig is
either the LAN port although technically,
I think this thing doesn't support SFP plus port.
No point though.
So, I'm not gonna bother with LAN.
I'm not gonna bother going 10 Gig from here to here.
So I just need to make myself a cable
that goes from there to,
I don't know, let's say, there.
Before anyone brings it up,
I am aware that generally you'd prefer stranded compared to
a solid core cable for an application like this but,
this was all we had lying around in Cat6a
and it's just for me,
so I know not to bend it around a bunch
cause that's the disadvantage of solid core
is you can fatigue the metal and it can crack and break
inside the cable.
Good luck everybody.
Well, now wonderful.
When to put the kids to bed and
boom internet connected,
dream machine is connected.
Sweet, this is a really slick startup wizard.
Lttstore.com, man, they have a nice interface these days.
99 percent experience.
This is a sweet feature
being able to do a quick scan of the RF environment.
Obviously there's other ways to do it.
There's phone apps.
I had my old Channelizer Wispy doodad way back in the day
so I could even see things that weren't WiFi devices but
having it just right in here,
this easy to use, is pretty great.
This is great information.
Channel one is pretty much wide open.
So that'll be a perfect spot to
plunk my 2.4 Gigahertz SSID on.
I only really use it for like random old devices
that don't support five Gigahertz
especially now that I'm making this upgrade.
I should have awesome wireless coverage.
This is a visualization of data transmissions
that are going on across these frequencies.
Hallway, check that out all my stuff's up in here.
I remember how to do it now.
Once you've created your wireless networks,
you just have to go into each radio.
So here we've got our 2.4 Gigahertz
and then our two five Gigahertz radios.
And then we have to disable.
There we go.
And there we go.
Now it's time for a quick speed test.
Let's just see how we're doing here.
Bear in mind, of course,
I'm just down the hall from it though, real nice.
You can't tell because it's dark
but we're back at the tree now.
All right, so that's better than one of my results but,
quite a lot lower than one of the other ones.
In this corner of the house,
is a lot stronger than before.
Looks like the living room is as good or better as well,
at least on the download.
Well, I'm thrilled,
coverage is as good as what I had before.
The interface is fantastic.
This is actually gotten like so good
since last time I've looked at it in detail.
And while I did have slower uplink speeds in some places,
it was not cripplingly slow
by any stretch of the imagination.
And it's more than made up for
by the fact that when I am close to the access point
speeds are both up and down,
way in excess of what I was getting with my old one.
We're talking just about
16 megabytes per second sustained on a modern client.
That's freaking awesome.
Of course, one of my goals was to have WiFi
way out in the street in front of my house
so that I can be browsing that internet
without using mobile data while my kids are playing.
So, for that, we're gonna have to bring out the Big Kahuna
and crawl around to my attic.
I want more wireless range,
basically straight out in front of this peak.
Oh, right there, yeah.
It's gotta pick up patterns, kind of like that.
So I'm thinking I should basically
be able to have WiFi anywhere in front of my house.
(drilling sound)
Oh, hello.
It's like a dance party in my attic now,
if you could just hang out here for, oh no.
- [Speaker] Are you okay?
- [Instructor] Oh yeah, I'm fine, I just,
almost put a foot through the living room ceiling.
Not a lot of extra slack on it
but as long as I nail the termination on the first try it
should be fine.
We got lights it's a good sign.
Connect, does this thing not have 2.4 Gigahertz support?
Oh weird, it has three five Gigahertz radios.
It claims Note Nine is unholy,
but that can't be right.
I'm gonna unplug it I don't trust it.
All right, now the clients are switching over for sure.
All right, let's have a look.
The reception sucks though.
Only got a couple of bars and speed, not too great.
This is good.
Everything is behaving as it should.
We are behind its pickup pattern.
Now let's go out in front of it.
Now we got good reception.
That's where it's mounted.
Up there on that peak, okay?
That is definitely better.
Maybe not as better as I might have hoped.
Let's go further away though.
I'm now out in the middle of my cul-de-sac
but a stone's throw from my house.
And that's looking pretty good, okay?
Let's see how far we can take this party.
I'm now standing on the boundary of my neighbor's yard
across the entire cul-de-sac, Dang!
still get 100 megabit yoh!
Start walking down the street.
I'm now on another half cul-de-sac away
down to two bars now but
still getting 50 megabit, only 10 up.
How am I gonna upload my YouTube stories?
Let's go about another cul-de-sac away.
Man, I'm like real far away from my house right now.
I'm at least 50 meters from my front door.
That's 150 feet for my Yankee friends.
I am close to 100 meters from my front door now.
And I still have 50 megabit on WiFi.
Okay, we good.
Why did it tell us mobility down there to do
data not on Ladies and gentlemen,
let's keep walking.
Over 100 meters from my friend door now.
Got like an epic WiFi emergency here,
Fire Department up to here
and it's dead.
Mission accomplished.
We got him.
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We're gonna have that linked down below.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe you would enjoy the last six workstations,
no wait, whole house one CPU
where I had like server machine in my closet
and ran fiber optic wires all over the house,
they're all actually still there
and I do have plans for them for the future.
But that video is definitely worth a watch.
I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore.