UniFi – Graves On SOHO Technology

New Gear: Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup

Apologies for the lengthy preamble. Back in 2001 when we moved into this house we started with Comcast cable modem internet access that delivered 5/1 mbps. We were committed to Comcast for cable TV since we were a Tivo household. Tivo DVRs leveraged cable and the Cable Card decryption scheme.

It also happens that Comcast’s internet access was not very reliable. That caused me to get a DSL service installed as a backup. The DSL service provided by Sprint was modest. We are some 11,400 feet from the nearest central office, which meant that 1.5 Mbps / 768 kbps was the best we could achieve.

Over a number of years, Comcast’s cable modem service got both faster and (somewhat) more reliable. Still, I retained the relatively pokey DSL service as a backup. After Hurricane Ike in 2008 I felt vindicated in that choice. Throughout and after that terrible storm we had sustained phone and internet access via that DSL service. In contrast, Comcast was out for a month.

There came a time when I realized that I had not used the DSL in over a year. And 4G wireless broadband had become available, so I could tether to a phone in a pinch. That combination supported ending the DSL service, which suffered declining cost/performance.

All that is back-story. In all that time, we never had a “dual-WAN” arrangement. Failover between the ISPs was manual. Typically, repatch the WAN port of the router to the desired modem, then load a different WAN configuration. Not difficult. But manual.

Well, no longer! Last week I took delivery of the new Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup device. Newly introduced for just $99 this wee magic wand promises an affordable, automatic backup to a 5G wireless service. It’s not locked to any carrier. At the outset it works with AT&T, T-Mobile, and presumably their MVNOs.

Combination Wi-Fi Routers Are Dumb

The FCC made big news last month when it move to ban consumer routers made overseas. This got me thinking about consumer routers in general, and recalling back to when reliable Wi-Fi was something I was struggling to achieve. That was in the early days of this blog. I think that, in solving our Wi-Fi problem I failed to clearly state something that bears repeating now…combination Wi-Fi routers are dumb and should be avoided.

If you want to have consistent, reliable, Wi-Fi coverage, in a larger home or across an entire property, a combination Wi-Fi router at an arbitrary location is not going to be a good solution. You should be using dedicated Wi-Fi access points. And the location of each access point should be carefully considered.

Extreme Power Over Ethernet

If you’ve been reading hereabouts for some time, you likely know that I am an advocate for power-over-ethernet. In it’s earliest days, almost twenty (!) years ago, I started blogging in order to share my experience combining working from a home office full-time, leveraging broadband-over-DSL and IP telephones.

SIP/IP telephones and Wi-Fi access points are natural gateways into P.O.E. That’s certainly how I got started. At first, I used POE insertors. As the number of POE-capable devices mounted, I migrated to Ubiquiti Unifi POE switches.

Sunday Afternoon at The Micro Center

Last weekend I ventured out to our local Micro Center. I hadn’t been there for several years. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience, even if I didn’t buy anything on this occasion. In some fashion, it was a grounding experience.

I have a long relationship with The Micro Center. When I first moved here from Toronto in 1998 it was an eye-opening place. That was before Amazon.com, when computer stores were still a thing, and software was bought on floppy disk or CD-ROM. The Micro Center was a place I could go and lay hands on things before making a purchase. As a lark, one day I was there with Stella and I hugged a fancy new computer. Thereafter, she started to call it “The Michael Center.”

On Sunday, August 10th, 2025 The Micro Center in Houston was busy! It had not occurred to me that this was the last weekend before kids started back to school. It was also a tax-free weekend for back to school supplies. The place was fully of families getting things their kids would need for school.

The Lenovo Twins

I was there just to look around the place, but I really wanted to lay hands on a Lenovo T14 laptop. It’s one model in the running to replace my 2019 X1 Carbon and my aged desktop. I found a T14 there on display along side a T16. This was enough to convince me that 16” is just too big a laptop for my tastes. I wish I’d brought my X1 Carbon with me. The T14 is markedly heavier, but had a built-in Ethernet port and is vastly more upgradable over time.

I came away from the Lenovo display wanting to get hands on their P14 model, which is a mobile workstation. Sadly, such was not available at The Micro Center.

It’s really difficult to move away from the X1 Carbon. It’s basically ideal for mobile applications. However, soldered in memory means that the only upgrade opportunity is the NVMe drive.

Ubiquiti Unifi UXG-Max Router: The Most Boring Installation in Memory

December 19, 2024
Michael Graves
infrastructure, networking, Uncategorized

The transition to AT&T Fiber meant jumping from 60/10 mbps service to 500/500 mbps service. Our old router was SmallWall on a recycled HP T620 Plus thin client. SmallWall is a fork of m0n0wall, which I used for years previously. And a history lesson, m0n0wall was the progenitor of pfsense.

Alas, that little hardware/software combination simply wasn’t up to this new, and much faster, ISP. It could only manage to pass 120 mbps. The CPU tracking in SmallWall didn’t show it to be overburdened. I suspect other aspects of the hardware were the problem. It has a dual-ported Intel NIC. They’re 1G ports, connected to the host via a PCIe x4 connector.

I could have swapped out the T620 Plus for something newer and faster. However, I decided to extend our installation of Ubiquiti Unifi gear by adding their Unifi UXG Max router. That would allow me to see the ISP/router performance in the Unifi UI, which is handled by the Unifi Controller app running on a local Raspberry Pi400.

We came to use the Unifi line by way of their Wi-Fi access points. That was the end-state of what had been a long-running search to deliver reliable Wi-Fi. When our Ubiquiti PowerAP N died we deployed Unifi AC Pro access points. So began our foray into “software defined networking.”

Rewiring the Network Core: Part 2 – Beats, Wi-Fi & Brittle Cables

As was mentioned previously, I’ve been upgrading the network installation in the central hall of our home. The new vertical rack cabinet is now installed.

The paint job is a little splotchy. A contractor we had working for us the other day commented on the “neat cloud effect” I had achieved. I had to admit it wasn’t intentional, but it’ll do for now. It’s mostly hidden from view. At least the color is a good match for the wall.

Vertical Rack

As you can see, power is still being supplied by way of a pigtail out the bottom to a nearby outlet. That’s temporary. It will be replaced by a wire fished through the wall.

You can also see the holes in the floor where network cabled once passed from under the house. I need to get wooden plugs to fill those holes. The cables now run into the wall, onward to the patch bay in the cabinet.