My love for UniFi WiFi points from Ubiquiti is a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I installed it at church and at our house. The church system is rock solid. The one at our house has caused me a lot of pain and I was pretty convinced one of the two access points had hardware problems so I unplugged it and put it on the shelf.
Recently, Tyla has been having WiFi troubles on her laptop. My first reaction was that the other access point was probably going bad so I started looking into the new distributed wireless (or mesh wireless) network devices like Eero, Orbi and Google WiFi. Those systems aim to simplify the deployment of multiple access points around your house.
I realized that they aren’t generally targeted at me. They lack some of the advanced features that I like and they generally use a wireless connection to sync up the access points. I have my house wired with CAT6 ethernet and want to have everything wired, if possible, including my access points. WiFi has been around since the turn of the century and it has been causing me pain ever since. If a device in my house doesn’t move, it gets a hardwired network connection. Wireless is reserved for laptops, phones and Internet of Things devices that don’t have a wired option. So that’s my long way of saying that I don’t want to have access points that connect to the mothership via wireless.
Before plunking down more money on some replacement hardware, I decided to give the UniFi system one more try. After a fresh look, I realized I should check the network cable that runs downstairs into the living room where I had the “broken” access point hooked up. Sure enough, one of the 8 wires is not connected! Duh. I used a different jack on the other side of the room and it worked fine. I’ll have to go back and figure out why that one jack doesn’t work, but for now, I’m up and running.
I flashed the firmware on both access points to the latest version, adjusted the placement of both access points to provide optimum coverage around our house, and now I wait to see if there are any more wireless networking reports from Tyla.