Wednesday, April 13

Ubiquiti’s 8-port POE switch is a solid complement for a home Unifi setup

It’s been a bit over six months since I made the switch from consumer-grade Wi-Fi at home to a more sophisticated set-up, tossing out my old Apple Airport Extreme base station in favor of three linked Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC-PRO access points. The change from consumer to enterprise gear (or "enterprise lite," as a lot of folks have e-mailed in to tell me) has been very positive and aside from a bit of management overhead and the pain of actually crawling around in my attic to run cables for the things, I don’t believe I have encountered any real downsides.

One major difference with the Ubiquiti Unifi APs is that they run on Power Over Ethernet (POE) rather than directly off of an electrical outlet. You don’t have to have a POE-compatible switch to use them, since the APs come with small POE injectors which can tap power from regular outlets, but having a POE switch simplifies set-up and also (assuming you connect the switch to a UPS) gives you an easy way to keep your Wi-Fi powered in the event of a power outage. After getting my Unifi gear installed, the first thing I looked for was a POE switch so I could ditch the little POE injectors.

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