6 ms·

Great, but my local ISP monopoly will be instituting data caps in 2022 (only after massive public pressure to delay) and therefore speed won't be my major issue

Great, but my local ISP monopoly will be instituting data caps in 2022 (only after massive public pressure to delay) and therefore speed won't be my major issue but instead overall data consumption. In fact, I'm looking into routers (UniFi Dream Machine) to throttle devices in order to prevent them from streaming 1080/4K video. I don't need technology to increase the speed at which I exhaust my data cap, I need legislation to outlaw data caps and create ISP competition.

zamadatix 6y ago
Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a decade ago now. The newer solutions focus on high desisty busness (local data need or call center/auditorium density) and newer direct high bandwidth device<->device connectivity.
- wp381640 6y ago
  Apartment buildings can have very noisy public spectrum which 6 will help with
  - stagger87 6y ago
    Unless people are sharing access points, WIFI 6 doesn't really help with this use case. You wouldn't get to take advantage of OFDMA or MU-MIMO in this scenario. At that point it's basically 802.11ac with 1024-QAM.
- hansel_der 6y ago
  i'd say the average house has only one wifi-ap and since 5ghz (AC) just barely pentrates a solid built wall, 2,4ghz-N is where the majority of wifi usefullness originates, which is even older ... but yea, cell confinement and directional interference optimisation is the way to go for high density applications.
  - vel0city 6y ago
    In terms of frequencies used for WiFi and the dates standards were ratified, 5GHz is technically older. 802.11a was ratified just before 802.11b, but came to market a little bit later and hardware was a bit more expensive.
    - hansel_der 6y ago
      > 802.11a was ratified just before 802.11b true and nobody used it, hence i was talking about AC which was practically the start of 5ghz wifi
- acdha 6y ago
  > Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a decade ago now This is only true for small houses with certain construction materials, few devices, and an internet connection under, say, 50Mbps. The last year has been especially good for seeing how rarely that's true for most people, however. It's so easy to find people talking about how upgrading from a 10-year old access point or adding 1-2 more made a huge difference for things like call latency or contention between devices. Having everyone home and trying to work, attend class, or socialize online made dealing with all of that a priority.
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    Aren't you saying pretty much the same thing? Upgrading from a 10 year old AP almost certainly means upgrading to 802.11ac since Wifi6 AP's are so rare. I don't know when 802.11ac AP's became common, but the first iPhone to support it was the iPhone 6 in 2014.
    - acdha 6y ago
      Not really – note the “nearly a decade ago” in the comment I replied to? AC was a win, yes, but it's not like the entire industry stagnated for a decade. Upgrading from even a 5 year old access point to a new one — or especially the scenario I described going from one to multiple in a mesh or backhaul setup – will make a big difference for call latency and gaming, simultaneous use (especially if you have a bunch of old IoT devices like my Toshiba orphaned TV), etc.
cromka 6y ago
By 2022 they may feel enough of the competition pressure from Starlink to abandon that idea. Hopefully yours and every other ISP out there.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  If starlink can maintain urban bandwidth, more power too them. But I think that 1/2/10,000 dishes per square mile will probably overwhelm the handful of sats flying over a town at any given moment. Starlink is no threat to wired services in urban areas.
- josefresco 6y ago
  If the local regional fiber ISP gets their act together that will motivate them to run fiber to our region. Otherwise I'm not holding my breath. I may have to supplement my wired network with a low cost cellular based network.
dan_quixote 6y ago
You should also keep an eye on idle data usage. I had several chromecasts plugged in around the house and discovered (with my UniFi setup) that they were each using about 500MB per day each just sitting idle. That's about 15GB per chromecast per month. Not trivial when you have several of them and a 1TB cap. More details: https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecasts-background-data-usage/ https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecast...
- josefresco 6y ago
  Agreed, unfortunately my router does not give me this data, so I have to go device-by-device. I'm hoping the UniFi Dream Machine will solve this both by allowing me to throttle, and giving me the data to address individually. I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer unused. That was an easy fix. Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was set to the highest quality. Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or giving users control.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    i have a UDM-pro and it's done a decent job at that - it's really neat tbh. But only get a UDM pro if you don't need link agger or the ability to control multiple networks from the same controller (i wanted to throw a USG at my parents but can't join it to the UDM pro because.. reasons). it has some annoying limitations (IDS/IPS cannot keep up with my internet anymore) that if i knew about i'd have gotten a USG-pro and a cloudkey.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  > 500MB What the hell is a idle chromecast doing everyday? That's absurd. Is it outbound WAN traffic or just local network traffic.
  - katbyte 6y ago
willis936 6y ago
I was strongly looking at a UDM this week. After reading through many testimonials: everything is not as it seems in unifi land. I went with an edgerouter-4 and will continue to use my R6700v2 as an AP. It’s a fine AP but a godawful router. It took disabling default configs to hit gig throughput. Forget enabling QoS. The WAN DHCP client also shits itself once a month. Enough is enough. The networking kit should be a box that sits in the corner and does its job.
- josefresco 6y ago
  > everything is not as it seems in unifi land Go on... A buddy of mine just dropped several G's on UniFi gear so I'm hoping he can tell me about any issues before I jump in.
  - willis936 6y ago
    The UDM line is about a year old and many features are in the "to-be-implemented" bin. This is a vague statement and I don't have specific examples on hand. I just recall seeing references to them when hunting around. I don't have firsthand experience. The UDM can't be adopted by another controller: it needs to be the unifi controller. This really kills the upgrade path imo. One of my best metrics for deciding what hardware to get is to look through the 1-star reviews for realistic testimonials by reasonable users. It takes a lot of sifting, but it builds an okay picture. There are almost no complaints about the ER-4 compared to the UDM. I think I'd likely roll a pfSense box before jumping into unifi. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_unknown?filterByStar=one_star&pageNumber=1 https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_...
    - katbyte 6y ago
      I got a UDM-pro and overall while i am very happy with the other unfi gear i have i would have not gotten the UDM pro if i'd known about the limitations before hand: can't adopt USGs to its controller, link agger doesn't work ("yet" so never), and IDS/IPS maxes out at around 800mbps and i have gbit now so its limiting my internet. i'd have gone with a USG-pro and cloudkey 2, but otherwise the unfi ecosystem has been good, i like the single plane view of my network and works well enough to not want to give that up
tschwimmer 6y ago
What's your local ISP's name?
- umeshunni 6y ago
  Probably starts with an X and ends with a finiti.
  - josefresco 6y ago
    Yes. The only other option is a regional fiber network which requires thousands (if you're lucky) up front to dig a trench to your house not to mention a very high monthly fee (which I'd gladly pay). I routinely use between 1.4-1.8 TB of data each month. I have about 30 devices connected to the network at any one time, maybe 50 total.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Do they offer a “business” connection? Often costs more for the same cable but is unmetered and comes with a static IP.
cybrjoe 6y ago
Maybe someone more versed in UniFi will step in but from what I've experienced throttling in UniFi exists across the entire network, not just WAN egress traffic. It severely limits it's usefulness.
- josefresco 6y ago
  Pretty sure from what I've read it allows per-device throttling. I'll try to dig up a link. Update: Throttling via groups: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to-Set-Traffic-Bandwidth-Limits https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to... While this isn't exactly "per device" throttling it looks like it can be used to achieve the same thing. I would most likely have a "low speed" tier that I assign to things like smart speakers, kids devices etc. I swear I saw some screenshots or maybe videos with a per-device throttle option but maybe I'm getting my routers confused.

zamadatix 6y ago

Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a decade ago now. The newer solutions focus on high desisty busness (local data need or call center/auditorium density) and newer direct high bandwidth device<->device connectivity.

wp381640 6y ago
Apartment buildings can have very noisy public spectrum which 6 will help with
- stagger87 6y ago
  Unless people are sharing access points, WIFI 6 doesn't really help with this use case. You wouldn't get to take advantage of OFDMA or MU-MIMO in this scenario. At that point it's basically 802.11ac with 1024-QAM.
hansel_der 6y ago
i'd say the average house has only one wifi-ap and since 5ghz (AC) just barely pentrates a solid built wall, 2,4ghz-N is where the majority of wifi usefullness originates, which is even older ... but yea, cell confinement and directional interference optimisation is the way to go for high density applications.
- vel0city 6y ago
  In terms of frequencies used for WiFi and the dates standards were ratified, 5GHz is technically older. 802.11a was ratified just before 802.11b, but came to market a little bit later and hardware was a bit more expensive.
  - hansel_der 6y ago
    > 802.11a was ratified just before 802.11b true and nobody used it, hence i was talking about AC which was practically the start of 5ghz wifi
acdha 6y ago
> Wi-Fi for home use was pretty well solved with AC nearly a decade ago now This is only true for small houses with certain construction materials, few devices, and an internet connection under, say, 50Mbps. The last year has been especially good for seeing how rarely that's true for most people, however. It's so easy to find people talking about how upgrading from a 10-year old access point or adding 1-2 more made a huge difference for things like call latency or contention between devices. Having everyone home and trying to work, attend class, or socialize online made dealing with all of that a priority.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  Aren't you saying pretty much the same thing? Upgrading from a 10 year old AP almost certainly means upgrading to 802.11ac since Wifi6 AP's are so rare. I don't know when 802.11ac AP's became common, but the first iPhone to support it was the iPhone 6 in 2014.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Not really – note the “nearly a decade ago” in the comment I replied to? AC was a win, yes, but it's not like the entire industry stagnated for a decade. Upgrading from even a 5 year old access point to a new one — or especially the scenario I described going from one to multiple in a mesh or backhaul setup – will make a big difference for call latency and gaming, simultaneous use (especially if you have a bunch of old IoT devices like my Toshiba orphaned TV), etc.

cromka 6y ago

By 2022 they may feel enough of the competition pressure from Starlink to abandon that idea. Hopefully yours and every other ISP out there.

sandworm101 6y ago
If starlink can maintain urban bandwidth, more power too them. But I think that 1/2/10,000 dishes per square mile will probably overwhelm the handful of sats flying over a town at any given moment. Starlink is no threat to wired services in urban areas.
josefresco 6y ago
If the local regional fiber ISP gets their act together that will motivate them to run fiber to our region. Otherwise I'm not holding my breath. I may have to supplement my wired network with a low cost cellular based network.

dan_quixote 6y ago

You should also keep an eye on idle data usage. I had several chromecasts plugged in around the house and discovered (with my UniFi setup) that they were each using about 500MB per day each just sitting idle. That's about 15GB per chromecast per month. Not trivial when you have several of them and a 1TB cap. More details: https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecasts-background-data-usage/ https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecast...

josefresco 6y ago
Agreed, unfortunately my router does not give me this data, so I have to go device-by-device. I'm hoping the UniFi Dream Machine will solve this both by allowing me to throttle, and giving me the data to address individually. I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer unused. That was an easy fix. Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was set to the highest quality. Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or giving users control.
- katbyte 6y ago
  i have a UDM-pro and it's done a decent job at that - it's really neat tbh. But only get a UDM pro if you don't need link agger or the ability to control multiple networks from the same controller (i wanted to throw a USG at my parents but can't join it to the UDM pro because.. reasons). it has some annoying limitations (IDS/IPS cannot keep up with my internet anymore) that if i knew about i'd have gotten a USG-pro and a cloudkey.
notyourwork 6y ago
> 500MB What the hell is a idle chromecast doing everyday? That's absurd. Is it outbound WAN traffic or just local network traffic.
- katbyte 6y ago

willis936 6y ago

I was strongly looking at a UDM this week. After reading through many testimonials: everything is not as it seems in unifi land. I went with an edgerouter-4 and will continue to use my R6700v2 as an AP. It’s a fine AP but a godawful router. It took disabling default configs to hit gig throughput. Forget enabling QoS. The WAN DHCP client also shits itself once a month. Enough is enough. The networking kit should be a box that sits in the corner and does its job.

josefresco 6y ago
> everything is not as it seems in unifi land Go on... A buddy of mine just dropped several G's on UniFi gear so I'm hoping he can tell me about any issues before I jump in.
- willis936 6y ago
  The UDM line is about a year old and many features are in the "to-be-implemented" bin. This is a vague statement and I don't have specific examples on hand. I just recall seeing references to them when hunting around. I don't have firsthand experience. The UDM can't be adopted by another controller: it needs to be the unifi controller. This really kills the upgrade path imo. One of my best metrics for deciding what hardware to get is to look through the 1-star reviews for realistic testimonials by reasonable users. It takes a lot of sifting, but it builds an okay picture. There are almost no complaints about the ER-4 compared to the UDM. I think I'd likely roll a pfSense box before jumping into unifi. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_unknown?filterByStar=one_star&pageNumber=1 https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B081QNJFPV/ref=cm_cr_...
  - katbyte 6y ago
    I got a UDM-pro and overall while i am very happy with the other unfi gear i have i would have not gotten the UDM pro if i'd known about the limitations before hand: can't adopt USGs to its controller, link agger doesn't work ("yet" so never), and IDS/IPS maxes out at around 800mbps and i have gbit now so its limiting my internet. i'd have gone with a USG-pro and cloudkey 2, but otherwise the unfi ecosystem has been good, i like the single plane view of my network and works well enough to not want to give that up

tschwimmer 6y ago

What's your local ISP's name?

umeshunni 6y ago
Probably starts with an X and ends with a finiti.
- josefresco 6y ago
  Yes. The only other option is a regional fiber network which requires thousands (if you're lucky) up front to dig a trench to your house not to mention a very high monthly fee (which I'd gladly pay). I routinely use between 1.4-1.8 TB of data each month. I have about 30 devices connected to the network at any one time, maybe 50 total.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Do they offer a “business” connection? Often costs more for the same cable but is unmetered and comes with a static IP.

cybrjoe 6y ago

Maybe someone more versed in UniFi will step in but from what I've experienced throttling in UniFi exists across the entire network, not just WAN egress traffic. It severely limits it's usefulness.

josefresco 6y ago
Pretty sure from what I've read it allows per-device throttling. I'll try to dig up a link. Update: Throttling via groups: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to-Set-Traffic-Bandwidth-Limits https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/204911354-UniFi-How-to... While this isn't exactly "per device" throttling it looks like it can be used to achieve the same thing. I would most likely have a "low speed" tier that I assign to things like smart speakers, kids devices etc. I swear I saw some screenshots or maybe videos with a per-device throttle option but maybe I'm getting my routers confused.