This holiday I decided to finalize upgrades at the in-laws re: WiFi as the Apple Airport Extremes I put in a long time ago were getting long in the tooth. Seeing that this rig would have to be maintained my my more-local BIL, I chose Ubiquiti hardware, with a bunch of U7 Pros, a POE Enterprise Switch, and a Cloudkey.
During Thanksgiving, I discovered that I had previously hooked up a remote office space with a combination of fast ethernet and two POTS lines from a single CAT3 8-conductor bundle. That was not going to work with a Pro 7 if we wanted anything close to the speed it should be able to deliver.
So then I got spend a whole day swimming in fiberglass, crushing mouse poop with my knees, and dangling from high places as I slowly but surely replicated the path of the extant CAT3 with a parallel CAT6. The joy was immense as I finished with the last bit of spackle to cover my ham-fisted attempts to mouse my way through ceilings / floors, etc. A touch of the sander + white paint and no one will know this clown was up there to start with.
Interestingly, I also discovered that Ubiquiti gear seems to be incredibly tolerant re: outdated wiring, even at 200+ feet. Most of the network wiring here is CAT3 from 1985 and yet the Ubiquiti gear is connecting at 2.5Gbps whilst providing POE to the remote APs. Some day I may replace the CAT3 with CAT6 but after spending a day just running up and down stairs / ladders for a single drop, I’m too lazy.
Great joy was had by all the young ones on their devices as POE allowed me to reposition the U7’s into better locations than the line-powered Airport extreme APs could be.
I remain somewhat unimpressed with the Ubiquiti iOS management tool whose latency, for example, can give you the idea that the APs are not managing roaming as expected. There also have been some pretty widespread reports of issues with the U7 Pro’s online. But for the most part, the system just works very nicely and connects via a copper 10GbE SFP+ transceiver to the Fios gateway.