Interesting Troy went full-on wireless for all this. I'll be building a new home soon and am somewhat inclined to run wires to everywhere that little sensors and activators and other devices will go. Mainly for more peace of mind re security, reduced spectrum noise, reliability (and of course power).
I just wish there were more wired product options out there. Love to hear recommendations.
Also, is Ubiquity generally considered more suitable now than OpenWRT/Tomato/Dd-WRT and the like? At present I have a fleet of off-the-shelf routers deployed at various properties with custom bits added to the firmware (for improved monitoring, history, auditing, even periodically speed testing radio links and whatnot).
I read sometime back Ubiquity killed off some of the programmability features and that lent some wariness to my long term plans to switch over to their gear.
I will second that eventually smart home (accent on home, not household) will go full wired, while semi-disposable gadgets may well stay wireless, but the idea of fully wireless home automation is now out of the windows for so many reasons.
I had a discussion with one guy from IKEA who bid on "full wireless" because "it is where Apple, and Google go."
The conversation went all went fine for him until a moment of Zen enlightenment hit him: "Outside Europe, people live in concrete houses." That very moment the smile vanishes from his face, and the guy looked like he felt a total facepalm moment.
The only place I know where a lot of houses are made of wood are Scandinavia and North America. In the rest or Europe most houses are made of bricks and/or concrete as far as I can tell.
Ruckus [0] gear is generally considered to be the step-up from Ubiquiti (although their point-to-point stuff is really good). The RF design is supposedly more complex and advanced in Ruckus APs with advanced antennas and their proprietary BeamFlex technology... not just reference-design SoC stuff.
Also... since I’ve been looking at Ruckus APs recently (they offer several WiFi 6 APs) I learned that their APs have two part numbers with different prices. The '901' part numbers ship with Solo AP firmware that can run in either Standalone mode or will join a Ruckus ZoneDirector or SmartZone controller. The less expensive '9U1' part numbers ship with “Unleashed” code that will not connect to a ZD/SZ controller, and instead look for a local Unleashed network. The price difference is due to support entitlements; controllers license number of APs per controller/cluster, and Unleashed support is one license for up to 25 APs in the network. (Seems like most home users go with Unleashed. [1])
Also, one thing to note with some Ruckus APs (like those that support 802.11ax) are the PoE requirements. The RF power is reduced and/or some features become unavailable depending on the power available. (It’s all listed on the AP data sheets, just need to be aware of it.)
Thanks for the pointer. I’m seriously considering jumping off the UniFi bandwagon due to their mounting technical debt. UniFi seems to be stuck on MongoDB 3.4 and Java 8. I can live with that, even though it’s a sign that their developers are not keeping up. The straw that’s about to break the camel’s back that that they’re stuck on an old version of dropbear. The latest OpenSSH refuses to negotiate public key auth with it because the old dropbear doesn’t support modern signature algorithms.
(Yes, I know how to override OpenSSH’s config for this. No, I shouldn’t have to.)
Ubiquity definitely also has a lot of issues. Unstable firmware's, non-responsive support on their forums, deprecating working products... Like you can't self host their DVR software, but the newest versions don't run on older hardware so you have to buy a new hardware to get new software.
Also their product lines Edge and Unifi don't work together, so you can't manage an EdgeRouter with Unifi or vice versa, for which I don't think there is a technical reason, just commercial.
Hardware wise they also have made strange choices regarding PoE, don't assume your Unifi PoE switch will work with your Unifi PoE device (really double check the versions, voltages, passive/active)
So lots to complain, though I think it is still the most accessible pro-sumer networking stuff.
Newer Unifi products use the correct standard 802.3af/at PoE, but you are correct their older gear uses some non-standard 24V (I believe).
I have been using their "Dream Machine" and a mesh node for about 6 months now and have had 0 problems, but I have not tried to tinker around too much yet!
I work as a software dev for a company that does home automation systems [0] targeted at "high net worth individuals" (ie: people with large homes). Our product mainly goes into new custom built homes during the construction phase and we do everything hard wired. If you have the opportunity to go hard wired over wireless you'll thank yourself in the long run.
I just wish there were more wired product options out there. Love to hear recommendations.
Also, is Ubiquity generally considered more suitable now than OpenWRT/Tomato/Dd-WRT and the like? At present I have a fleet of off-the-shelf routers deployed at various properties with custom bits added to the firmware (for improved monitoring, history, auditing, even periodically speed testing radio links and whatnot).
I read sometime back Ubiquity killed off some of the programmability features and that lent some wariness to my long term plans to switch over to their gear.