Alex's Insane 2021 Home Network Upgrade & Tour!!

So welcome to this nice mind video, today we're going to look at all of this, so every year in the tech stream so far we've done some type of

network

upgrade

in my house, which is where we are now in the kitchen. Bar none, here we have the Unified Dream Machine, which is pretty much the nerdiest

home

router you can buy. We also have the Ubiquiti redundant power system that we will install and analyze, and then move forward. On the other side we have a bunch of access points from this 1,500 pound beast that we are going to put on the roof of my house and some small baby switches and some access points for the inside of the house, so without further ado preambles, let's get into them all.

These boxes are cool, guys, so I'll do my best to try to explain this part by part, piece by piece, so you know what's going on here. We have three pieces of new ubiquity hardware down here. I have what's called a UPS, a redundant power supply, so what this will do is power our devices like our dream machine, which we'll access next, and our switch, if the power goes out, will keep these devices working, which is great. because let's say we have security cameras connected to our switch, the power goes out, our security will still run second here, like I said we have udm pro or ubiquity dream machine which is a very good name for a router if I say so myself and it's a great router, we'll install it in this video above.

We have one of the ubiquity poe switches. They now make numerous switches, some cheap ones that don't have poe and others. A little bit more expensive, like the one we have here now, basically PoE based, means you can connect things to this switch, like this wireless access point here or some cameras, some CCTV cameras, and it will also transfer data power. the device is great because one cable has power and data so through this cable i connected my laptop to this

network

and it asks me to configure all this so i will give a name to the udm.

Pro here we go, we'll go next and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to log into my ubiquity account so I can access all of this stuff from the cloud, which means yes, I have access to my router switches, absolutely everything that needs to be done. With ubiquiti, it doesn't matter where I am in the world, with an Internet connection, so below, udm pro has performed a speed test of my Internet in this house which, as you can see, has 304 megabytes downstream and 54 megabytes upload with a ping of eight milliseconds now. the udm needs to know this because what they are going to do is something very smart because they know the speed and they can say ah, it's okay if a device uses 300 megabytes, but

alex

below wants to load a 4k youtube video on the tv or something like this and it's lagging because the router actually knows what speeds we're getting in the house, it can go ahead and manage which devices and where the speed goes so that no one device hogs the entire network.

That makes sense now, as you'll see. with my old ubiquiti setup which is currently still running in my rack right now and will soon be replaced by all of this. In this video you will see that there is a device there called a cloud key. Now what that device does is manage everything. of these devices, things like switches and access points and also manages all the security, like all the recording of all the CCTV cameras, now the udm pro or the dream machine has the cloud key and the router integrated into a single device. So you've seen me earlier in the video put a hard drive here or an ssd because all the cameras are going to record on that ssd and here is the screen where I can go ahead and choose to configure the network or Let's go to the protection side and We actually get a sneak peek at some things Ubiquity is working on, like some access equipment and some VoIP phones.

Now these thick cables look very, very official and that's because they're essentially on this side. We have our normal power cables powering our dream machine and our switch right now, but these big fat ones are connecting our dream machine with switch to this redundant power source, so now technically if I were to unplug one of these elements, It should remain on. I turned off the power to the switch, but as you can see, it stayed on. Our access point is on because it's being powered by the redundant power system, so at least we know everything is working fine, now it's all set. upstairs, I need to move it to my shelf over there, which means taking out some of the older equipment, but we're not going to take out all the older equipment.

I want to take you to my house right now and show you some. of the equipment that I'm going to keep, so while everything is updated, this is the uap flex hd, the type of pole-shaped access point that I installed there, as you know, and I will put links to all of this. in the description ubiquity creates a lot of access points one of which i already set up in my office but there is a problem with it and what ubiquity sent me is going to order these to be some faceplate covers for access of ubiquity. points and here is our hotspot, so now I should go there, oh, that's much better.

This is a little PoE powered switch that we have that we're going to install later in this video, behind my desk. down here we have another network switch from unified, this one will stay here, it's for all the devices that are on my shelf in the kitchen and now the last piece of my unified network already built is this 60 watt power switch that actually It lives in my garage, ubiquiti sent this which is a little crazy, it's called a unifi industrial switch and I think it's more suitable for a place like this, a garage somewhere in industry, look how cool this is, no I thought this was going to be as big as it is and it's very heavy, okay, a full metal jacket on this, we have a unification or ubiquity logo on the top, I guess this is all to dissipate heat and then, where are all our ports?

Are they under here? Look at that absolute beast that uses the industrial switch and as you can see I also turned my garage into a little more of a room than a garage so ubiquity also sent me a nano HD access point that can live here and be powered by that industrial switch, so we have Wi-Fi access here, so with my previous network explained, it's time to move all this new equipment to the server rack, which if you didn't know, is up here, okay? So one thing I would like to point out is that these power cables that connect the rps to the devices like the dream machine and the switch are absolutely huge.

I don't know if my rack will be deep enough to thick, these cables come out the back, well, here we are. This is my new rack. I hope you like it if we try to remember what it was like here before I had my old UPS's just sitting here powering everything. The entire rack itself was a mess. I had the wires terminated at the switch. There was no patch panel inside. There was a rack where my nas unit was and here in the UK I actually have my rack on it. loft but for this network rig it can easily reach 80 degrees and still be fine and it's nowhere near that in a UK loft so I'm not worried about this anyway I managed to find out where all the cables in my house. down here and I connected them all into this patch panel so as you can see I have all the cables going to the numerous places around the house, this little blue cable here is fiber optic that goes down to a switch that is on my closet, we have the redundant power supply at the bottom, the dream machine in the middle and then obviously the switch at the top, this looks much better than before, so you can see here now that everything is on, these little screens. doing its thing, but now back up and running because the rps is connected to my UPS if I were to turn this rack on and off now, as you can see a power supply failure, but everything else stays on, everything still works, all my cameras are still recording which is the main thing really security, I don't mind having the wifi off if there's a power outage I just want to keep my cameras recording and as you can see we're all working pretty well right now .

Yeah, this is amazing, okay, so now it's the next day because honestly, yesterday we were filming all day doing the rack and everything, and it took us a lot of time the next day and we're going to continue with the network

tour

, so essentially Now I'm in my boiler room upstairs. This is an eight-port switch from Ubiquiti. It's been here for as long as I can remember. This is where the other side of that fiber cable goes. If you remember, there is a fiber cable in the rack that powers this. switch here now I call this switch my smart switch because on this shelf I have things like my philips hue uh hub here I have my somfy hub which actually controls my smart blinds and then I have the fabarro

home

center here which controls all of my smart plugs I've made a video about it, so I'll put a link to it and on the card there, if you want to see it here, I have a ubiquitous hotspot.

Now you may be thinking, Alex, why do you have so much? Lots of access points around the house, this one has one job and one job only and that is to broadcast a wireless network which is for all the smart lights so all my lifx lights and it also has a smart network here for things like Google. houses that run on five gigahertz, like things like Chromecasts for 4k streaming, different things like that and the nas that I moved here to now is connected to this switch okay so this is the flex hd a hotspot really attractive it looks like different i guess a lot of ubiquiti access points look different because this one here we are going to replace this one with is called recessed now we have one of these in my office this one used to be on the wall because it used to be on the other side of this wall, but I've actually done some things to this kitchen so it's no longer fit for purpose, but this will just plug in there like that, the bottom piece goes on and then this can just sit on this counter like this, now this access point comes with wall brackets and stuff, but for my installation it literally just wants to sit here like this and then this cable, you guessed it, goes into the rack that we just put up. patched up there, okay, this is really weird, we're going to put that huge antenna on my roof in a little while, but this is a new Ubiquiti switch, it's going to be my new office switch, look how small.

This thing is, oh, it's even smaller than I thought. See, it's called the Flex Mini and one of the reasons I really like it is because it works with USBC or PoE. Obviously, the switch we installed in the rack has PoE. All the ports in my house are connected to that switch in the rack so no matter where I plug it in my house I have four extra Ethernet ports so I'm really excited about this I could velcro it to the back of my computer. because it's very small, but if I take out this ethernet cable that's connected to the rack in the loft, I plug it in here, it should provide poe power to power the switch, which turned on and now I can take this little plug in the patch cable, plug it into the computer and now my computer has access to LAN and internet and I also have three spare ports for other devices so the flex mini appeared on unify.

We can go ahead and click adopt here to Adopt it, I'm going to click on this, I'm going to give it a name, I'm going to call it office switch and here, even though this switch is so small, you can clearly see what it's connected to, so we have port number two and port number one. as an uplink from my office computer and I think this is a yes you can go ahead and apply VLANs to all these ports on this little switch which is really crazy so it was adopted and it works fine so I just after finishing the installation. this nano hd on the ceiling and now I'm applying one of the skins to it so it doesn't look like a boring old access point.

It now looks like a marble finish, which is quite nice and is now being driven by industrial technology. switch we just put on the wall here this thing looks like an absolute deal super happy with it it's actually doing a few things this switch for me as you can see there are two ethernet ports here one of them going up the frame. up in the loft and one of them that actually goes back to the kitchen so the stuff in the kitchen goes to this switch and then to the grill and then to the internet so this is kind of a jump for me and this .

The switch with its poe also powers a couple of cameras,so like the access point here, it has this little flexible camera here that's for my garage and then there's another camera on the outside of this wall that feeds for my garden, okay? It's been a few days, as you can see, I have the gopro strapped to my chest. It's time to finish this video by putting this monster application on my roof. It's now called Bass Station xg by ubiquity and this is actually a bit. Over the top, it's completely designed for things like stadiums, football stadiums, densely populated areas, this is a real beast of a radio that can have up to 1,500 clients connected at once, so what I'm going to do is live in a new property. where houses are being built right now so I'm going to provide some free wifi for people to connect to because obviously people may not have moved their broadband to their new house yet so let's take out the stairs and install this on the ceiling, quickly looking around this access point, you can see that there is a screen here.

I think it will show things like how many people are connected, the current IP address, etc. We have a gig. port here and then because this access point can support so many clients, we actually have a 10 gig port on this side, which is pretty crazy, two, okay, okay, let's launch it now, okay , then this is the access point that was already here. I'm going to replace this is one of the ubiquity outdoor access points. It's a pretty good access point. What we're doing now with this one is definitely overkill, so I'm going to remove this one and then put this one in.

Check this out, there's a little spider hiding here. I'm not a fan of spiders but it's very cute and now I'm wondering if under our little screen it's on, yes it is on, look it says unify sdn and it has selected an IP address 192.168. 55.76 seems like the deal, I mean it should be worth fifteen hundred pounds. I hope I have a signal there, well guys, what a video this has been and what a calm and pleasant day to finish it. we have the low xg station on the roof, what I want to do is walk down this path and see how far we can push it, see how far I can stay connected, so follow me okay, so you can see right now.

In fact, I have two three-bars and we are pretty close to the house. What I expect to happen is that as we get a little bit further out, this should jump to three bars and then go down, I think we are. a little too close for what's going on with this hotspot because it's a beast, literally, just like I said, it gets to three and we move away from the house, okay, I'll stop here and we'll do a speed. test okay, so nine ping and okay, we're maxing out at about 100 megabits per second and yeah, we're pretty close to the house, I think we can keep going, so I have a bar for the hotspot that I can physically.

I don't see it, oh, it just jumped to two. I physically can't see my house. There's a physical house between us and my house and we're about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven houses away from my house, which is pretty mental, so let's go. Let's see if we can do a speed test, if this gives a result, it's getting 70 megs and I'm at least eight houses away, that's unreal, so what place to end this video at literally a hundred megs of wifi at eight houses of my house. If that doesn't say much, I don't know what it does.

If you have any questions the comments section is the place and as always if you enjoyed this video please give us a thumbs up because it helps more than you would think but for now my name has been

alex

this has been techflow and see you in the next peace.