The home network finally got an upgrade. The uplink from the house is a 1G/1G fiber connection with Hiper as ISP. Wifi was running of a Google Wifi (1gen) network with 3 nodes in a network. It worked, but with Wifi being somewhat aged no device on wifi would be able to utilize the full bandwidth :(

This is just a brief post on the plan, the equipment and the future plans for this new Ubiquiti network.

The Plan

My ISP Hiper supports using your own router, and my new plan was to make a forward looking plan for the network.

The plan included:

• Replacing the ISP provided Zyxel router - worked fine, but it’s a “home router” level router.
• Replacing Google Wifi with a new wifi network (potentially with - seperate VLANs, and seperate Wifi networks for guests).
• Use Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) to limit powersupplies and minimize cable mess.
• Open option to replace existing cameras, get a video doorbell and other stuff.

Now for reasons, it’s not possible to (at least easily) wire the entire house, so there would neet to be a wireless mesh to create uplink from the opposite end of the house (where the home office is) than the place where the fiber connection is.

The Equipment

To get the new network going I purchased:

• One Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber (UCG-Fiber).
• Two Unifi U6 Long Range Access points (U6-LR).
• One Ubiquiti UniFi Switch Ultra 60W (USW-Ultra).
• One PoE injector (which turned out I didn’t need yet).

The Setup

By the fiber entry point the new UCG-Fiber replaced the ISP provided router and a small 5 port switch. The USG-Fiber has a PoE port to which one of the U6-LR access points was attached. The 3 other ports in the switch build into the USG-Fiber was used for devices previous attached to the small switch.

The other U6-LR was placed in the opposite end of the house, configured with wireless uplink (to the first AP) and the USW-Ultra Switch was attached to the ethernet port on the AP. The AP provide wifi (mesh) and uplink (to internet) from the switch. The rest of the ports on the switch was used by the internal office network - printer, HomeAssistent server and other gadgets in the office.

The original plan was to use the switch with the UCG-Fiber, but it turned out there was exactly enough ports in the UCG-Fiber (including the one needed PoE port to power an AccessPoint), so the existing switch in the office was retired too and thus allowed me to deloy the USW-Ultra and get a fully Ubiquiti managed network.

At the time of writing Ubiquiti has launched multiple U7 access points providing Wifi 7. I choose to go with the U6-LR as (1) they’re cheaper and (2) I don’t have many devices supporting wifi7 (yet - if any). When the need arise I can add U7 access points or replace the two existing.

The Future

UCG-Fiber supports all the extras avaialble from Ubiquiti including:

• Video Doorbells
• Cameras
• Telephony
• Teleport - VPN
• Audio
• Digital signs

I may look to add Ubiquiti cameras and a doorbell to the setup. To add the cameras, I would need to add an SSD harddisk to the Fiber Gateway, but it’s an easy do-it-yourself task which doesn’t require any special skills (but do require I buy a harddisk and the tray needed for the UCG-Fiber).

Connecting the Ubiquiti Fiber Gateway to Hiper

I’m using Hiper as my ISP of choice. The documentation on Hipers website is, however, not updated with instructions for the current version of the Unifi software, so I had to fiddle a bit to find the new place in the interface to setup the VLAN tagging needed to get the internet connection up and running.

In the current platform you’ll find the settings in the Settings (Gear symbol in lower left corner), the choose internet, choose the Primary WAN (where your fiber is connected).

Find “Advanced” and set it to “Manual” - and set the VLAN ID to 101. That’s it. If you’re at the right place it should look somewhat like the screenshot below: