Setting up a Ubiquiti Unifi Network

Hello! Here I will write out the steps that I used to setup my Unifi network in November 2020. The focus is on wifi as that is primarily what we connect through.

Some Stats

1. I live in Ontario, Canada and my Internet Service Provider is Bell.
2. I have Internet, TV and phone with Bell.
3. I have a HomeHub3000.
4. I have 3 floors, the basement and top floor get the worst wifi reception.
5. Directly wired in speed was 90mbps.
6. Average wifi speed in the house was 60mbps.
7. Worst case speed was 5mbps, furthest away from the modem.
8. Best case wifi was 80mbps

This is awful as the advertised speed is 1000mbps and I don't think I ever saw speeds over 100mbps.

The HomeHub3000 is pretty bad but that is expected as it is pulling triple duty with it being a modem, a router, and wifi access point for quite a large area.

I decided to set up a proper network using networking gear from Ubiquiti. I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out. I saw almost everything triple in speed on the wifi and coverage is now significantly better. Thanks to the access points, there is now just one SSID for the wifi and it is strong on all three floors.

The worst room gets a consistent 150mbps. Wired in, I get 500mbps which is much better than I had hoped.

The next step would be to remove the HomeHub3000 completely with a SPF media converted and wire the Unifi Security Gateway directly to the fiber line but this seems to cause problems if you have Bell TV and phone. So for now I keep the HomeHub3000 around for the TV.

Devices

1. Unifi Security Gateway - $150
2. Unifi 5 Port Switch - $50
3. 2 Unifi Long Range Access Points - $250
4. 1 Unifi Access Point Lite - $100
5. NetGear 16 Port Switch - $50

Setup

1. Rename regular Bell wifi to something else and kick everyone off.
2. Turn of the Homehub3000.
3. Connect the HomeHub3000 LAN 1 to the USG WAN 1.
4. Turn on the HomeHub3000 after 30 seconds.
5. Connect a computer to USG LAN 1.
6. Navigate to 192.168.1.1, this is the router configuration page. Now we want to have our router use PPPOE to have a direct connection to the internet, that way it will do all routing.
7. Go to Configuration and change the connection type to PPPOE.
8. Fill in the username and password. You can find your bell username on your bell account page online. It will start with b1. The password is set on the modem and you can update it by logging into the Bell modem.
9. Download the Unifi Controller on the machine that you want to use as the server.
10. Follow the wizard and set up an account. I chose to make it local only.
11. Once you are in, navigate to Devices on the left side.
12. Adopt the USG router and wait for it to finish provisioning.
13. You should have internet access now!
14. Wire up the switches to the USG router.
15. Wire up the Access Points to the switches
16. Go Back to the Unifi Controller and adopt the switches and Access Points.
17. Once provisioned, your network is now functional
18. Update the Access Points
19. Update the Switches
20. Update the USG

Make sure to update in this order as you can brick things if the internet cuts out during the middle of updates. This is why you want to update the AP first, then the switches, and lastly the router.

Closing Thoughts

I think only the router and the access points are important. The access points give great coverage and the router significantly increased the wired in speed which seems to reflect poorly on the HomeHub300 as a router. The Unifi switch and the NetGear switch, I'm sure there's a difference but when I tested connections through them, I didn't find a significant speed difference.

Regardless, I'm pretty happy with my Unifi setup and the Unifi controller dashboard is really cool to play with. It can make a map of your network and it has a lot of functionality that you can mess around with. Compared to the HomeHub3000's dashboard this is a breath of fresh air.