Best Home Network 2021 - A Guide to the Best Available Network Equipment

what is the best bang for your buck home network setup that you can have in 2021 stick around and let's find out welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's chris and in this video we're going to show you two different home network setups for 2021 mostly unified based but both are what i consider to be excellent home network setups for a very basic home network that can be expanded upon as well as a more robust home network for those of you who are super network power users in this video we're going to be focusing mostly on what is considered to be prosumer network equipment mostly unify stuff but not all unifi however if you go down to your local big box electronics store you know best buy or whatever and you buy a router off the shelf and you put that in and it's working fine for you there's absolutely no problem with doing that this is sort of the next level beyond that the prosumer gear beyond your sort of linksys routers that you can purchase at best buy before we get started make sure you like and subscribe to crosstalk solutions if you haven't already follow us on twitter at crosstalk sol and if you're just interested in buying me a beer there is a link down below in the description to do that as well i should mention also that all product links that i am talking about in this video are down below now speaking of the products that are featured in this video i am calling this the best home network for 2021. one of the things that i'm basing this on is what is actually available today as we all know global chip shortages global supply chain issues as well as consumer demand has made a lot of the products especially ubiquity unified products unavailable so what i did here was i wanted to make sure that i picked only equipment that is actually available to purchase right now on the unifi store and that of course is always subject to change so go ahead and check the unifi store to see what is actually available at any given time we're going to start off with a basic home network and here i have a simple layout up here in the upper left we have our internet connection that comes into a modem that was supplied by our isp this is how most people receive their internet from that modem you are past the wan connection that plugs into the wan port of whatever firewall or router you happen to be using so for a basic home network in my opinion the udm is a really really great choice so the udm is 299 msrp it features unifi os already built into the device with unifi network stacked on top of unifi os it is your router and firewall it also has an integrated 802.11 ac 4x4 multi-user mimo wi-fi 5 access point that is a mouthful but basically it's an access point that's going to be sufficient for most normal size homes to provide coverage to the entire home and we're going to talk about expanding this network but for now and especially if you're just looking to get started in sort of the world of unified products this is an excellent entry point because it provides basically everything that you need to get started in one nice compact r2d2 looking form factor and it also allows for expandability if you need to add extra access points or extra switches which we're going to talk about in a second the udm features five gigabit ports on the back there is one lan port and then four lan ports this is for extra connectivity so for instance you might want to hardwire a pc but then you have all sorts of wireless equipment like a laptop or a wireless printer or your smartphone devices or your ipads right so again this all in one unit for 300 bucks is going to be sufficient for a very vanilla installation for you know 90 plus percent of the homes out there but let's say you get this installed and you realize that hey you know out in my out building or out in my garage or you know on the other side of the building i kind of have a little bit of spotty wireless i wish that you know i had a little bit better coverage out there how do you then expand this network well let's take a look at that next okay so here we have it i am using the udm as the core of the network it runs unify network it runs unify os it's my router firewall my first access point etc the next thing we're going to want to add into this network is a network switch so there are two options of network switch that i think would be excellent choices for the sort of next step of expanding this basic home network and that would be the us8 150 watt or the usw light 16 poe and again both of these are right now available in the ubiquiti store down here at the bottom you see sort of shaded in this red color i have the us860 watt which i think would be another excellent choice as well as the usw lite 8 poe neither of those are available right so they are sold out on the ubiquiti store it's not a product that you can get your hands on very easily today so taking that into consideration the us-8151 is a really nice switch especially if you're planning on doing any point-to-point wireless links reason being is that this switch unlike the 16 poe has the ability to uh to do 24 volt passive poe which some not all but some of the point-to-point wireless networking required so for instance if you have a barn that's you know 30 yards away from your main house and you wanted to just set up a point-to-point wireless connection out to that barn with a pair of nano stations or something like that you might need that 24 volt passive capability beyond that though it does 802.38 poe plus across all eight of those ports and it also includes two sfp fiber ports if you're interested in doing any sort of fiber connectivity to either devices or other switches for the same price for 199 dollars you could opt instead for this usw lite16 poe and i personally think this is a really nice switch if you don't have a need for sfps if you don't have a need for 24 volt passive poe and if you don't know what either of those things are then you probably don't have a need for them right so if you don't have a need for any of that sort of extra fancy stuff that comes on the us8 150 watt this is a really excellent choice the usw light 16 poe features eight standard gigabit ports right so non-powered ports non-poe ports but it also has eight 802.38 poe plus ports as well so that means you can power up to eight poe devices those poe devices might be extra access points they might be cameras for a surveillance system i don't have a surveillance system in this basic home network but the next one that we're doing the sort of more robust home network i do have surveillance built into that so make sure you stay tuned to the rest of this video you also might want to power up you know a voice over iphone a lot of people are working from home these days they might have a voice over ip phone that needs poe power this switch has eight ports of poe power and can power pretty much any poe device sort of any standard poe device another thing that i really really like for home networks is this usw flex mini and where i like this device is behind your television or sort of in your audio visual component rack if you will the usw flex mini is only 29 okay it has five gigabit ports one of the ports is for poe in meaning that the switch is powered by the poe port from this other switch over here so you just plug ethernet from say the usw lite16 poe over to the usw flex mini that powers up that device and then provides four additional gigabit ports for hardwired connectivity for things like your television or your you know your roku or your apple tv your sonos your playstation your xbox your nintendo switch right so you have basically four hard-wired ports and i have this exact same setup in two different areas in my house where i have poe power to the flex mini switch and then hardwired to the television and hardwired to a roku or a playstation whatever other devices i happen to have and it's really nice to have that hardwired connection because wireless can tend to be spotty right if you're watching netflix and it starts buffering because the wireless signal isn't great or there's too many people using the wireless etc etc right so this is just a really nice setup these little flex mini switches uh they sell them in one packs three packs and five packs the one packs are not sold out the five packs are not sold out but the three packs are currently sold out on the ubiquity store finally when we're talking about expanding wireless for a home network you know this udm provides a really nice 4x4 multi-user mimo access point integrated into the device itself but again if you've got areas where you might want a little bit better wi-fi there is no better bang for your buck than the u6 lite so there's a couple reasons that i really like this switch number one the price is amazing right so 100 bucks for this access point it's wi-fi six so it's relatively future proof and it's a two by two access point so it's not as powerful in terms of the amount of devices that can speak to the switch at one time but for most home users you would never notice the difference between a two by two access point and a four by four access point there just aren't enough devices in your home hammering on that wireless to actually make uh to basically to actually justify adding additional 4x4 access points to a home network so there you have my recommendations for a basic home network now let's take a look at a more robust home network for those of you who want to dig a little bit deeper into home networking here we have a look at a robust home network and again let me remind you that product links for everything that i'm showing here are linked down below in the description those are affiliate links so if you click on those it gives us a little bit of money but it does not change your price at all and we certainly appreciate any referrals that we get so let's start up here in the upper left again we have our internet coming in we have the same isp supplied modem that we had in the basic home network but now look at this we are going into a much more robust firewall and a lot of people i'm sure are going to comment on this video and say chris why didn't you use the udm pro the very popular ubiquity udm pro for your robust home network and there are a couple of reasons for that number one the udm pro in terms of firewall any of the unified firewalls are not great for networks once you get beyond the vanilla phase of the network or the very basic phase of the network so if you're looking to do things like site-to-site vpn or remote user vpn or multiple wan ip addresses or one to one nat these are all things that the unifi firewalls do not handle very well so again anything beyond a standard vanilla network but something like this netgate pf sense sg2100 will handle all of your network needs and then some the pf sense software is really really powerful especially for home networking i mean that sg 2100 would be great for a lot of businesses out there as well so the netgate pf sense sg 2100 msrp is 299 this firewall features one gigabit wan port which is a combination rj45 slash sfp port meaning that if your isp delivers fiber direct to your firewall this can handle that through the sfp port or it can also handle an ethernet rj45 handoff it also features 4 gigabit lan ports now the networks that i'm creating here are basically for you know what i think is going to be suitable for most users of course your particular situation might require something different so for instance if you happen to have two different wan connections at home you would not be able to use this firewall you'd want to upgrade to something like the 3100 which has two lan ports for different internet connections right but for most home users they only have a single wan connection so this sg2100 is going to be perfectly adequate another really good option for home users and in fact the firewall that i myself use in my own home network is this ubiquity edge router 4 but again notice it is shaded in red and what does that mean it means that this device is currently unavailable in fact most of the edge routers are currently unavailable but the ubiquiti edge router 499 msp so it saves you a hundred bucks off of this netgate it has three gigabit rj45 ports and one gigabit sfp port it's a really nice firewall and it will do a lot of the basics including vpn but if you want to start getting into some of the more advanced features like packet sniffing and traffic filtering uh you know the netgate is actually going to be a better choice for you okay so let's talk about switches so once again i have to go with what's available and the switches that i would recommend to expand this are going to depend on how many devices you need to hardwire how many access points do you have how many poe devices how many televisions and rokus and nintendo switches are you planning on hard wiring into your network versus just using wirelessly right so depending on how many devices that's going to very much depend on which switch is going to be best for your individual environment so i have three options once again we have the us8 150 watt same as before if you are planning on doing anything that requires 24 volt passive poe or if you want to start getting into the sfp gigabit stuff to to run fiber links between devices that's a really great starter switch but you know in a robust home network eight ports is actually going to be kind of limited so we also have our usw lite16 poe which again is 16 ports eight of which have poe plus power however there's no sfp ports and no 24 volt passive poe capability so let's pop down here instead to the usw 16 poe so this is a rack mount switch we're starting to get into some of the rack mount devices which for robust home networks you might actually have a rack that you can mount equipment in i know i certainly do in my own network so this is the sort of generation 2 16 port poe switch 299 dollars it gets you eight ports of 802.3 at poe plus uh gigabit as well as eight non-poe gigabit and two gigabit sfp ports for an extra eighty dollars you can upgrade to this usw 24 poe but as of the recording of this video actually i won't say that as of the designing of this document that usw 24 poe was not available but i actually just bought two of them today so i made this last night and then today those switches are available they weren't available last night they are available today so if you check the ubiquity store that stuff is changing very very often uh but i would also recommend if you're going to go for 16 ports you might as well go for 24 ports so if the 24 port switch is available pay the extra 80 bucks and get the extra poe plus ports so the usw 24 poe is 16 poe ports eight non-poe ports and then your two gigabit sfps now one thing that i am not including in either the basic home network or the robust home network is 10 gigabit networking right i did not cover 10 gigabit whatsoever again because i'm trying to cover what is going to be most commonly used in typical home network environments and even if you have a robust home network you typically don't need 10 gig links between your switches right or 10 gig links out to a nas right the amount of traffic that you can generate by the number of devices that most people have in their home networks is not going to saturate a one gigabit link let alone a 10 gigabit link so again if you disagree with me about any of this stuff put that down in the comments below but there is no 10 gigabit in any of the stuff that we're doing here okay so switches are gonna be up to you whatever you think you need for switches here are four good choices for switches depending on what happens to be it be available since this is a unified based network we're going to need a unifi controller and so the unifi controller that i have chosen for this setup is the cloud key gen 2 plus msrp on the cloud key gen 2 plus is 199 dollars and there's a couple of reasons that i picked the cloud key gen 2 plus versus the cloud key gen 2. number one the cloud key gen 2 non-plus version was not available in the ubiquiti store at the time that i designed this network number two the cloud key gen 2 non-plus version is only 20 cheaper than this so it's 179 bucks to me it's worth spending the extra 20 dollars to get the integrated hard drive in the gen 2 plus so that you can start with unifi protect surveillance if you want to go down that road and we're going to add surveillance to this network in just a little bit so make sure you stay tuned for that so this is a poe powered cloud key device it runs unifi os it runs unify network it has unifi protect i believe they've also added access and talk to the gen 2 plus but i could be wrong about that let me know if i'm wrong about that in the comments but basically this cloud key is going to have the controller for all of your various unify equipment basically the only thing in here that you won't be able to control would be that netgate pfsense sg2100 or the edge router if you go with the edge router i should also mention that you don't have to have this cloud key for unifios you can use a spare computer or an intel nook or something like that and have a unified network installed yourself onto that device you could also use a hosted unifi network that's what i use myself i host my own unifi network with digitalocean i've done numerous videos on how to set that up so go check out those videos or you could use something like hostify hostify is a really great option riley over at hostify excellent guy he has a really really good service i've got a link down below if you want to check out hostify it's a paid unifi os hosted controller but here's the thing that is not super obvious about hostify he includes support so if you want support on any of your unified devices you can sign up and as long as you have your unifi controller hosted with hostify they will also support your unifi network really really huge bonus by going with hostify link down below check them out for the access point and i should actually say access points because if you're at this level of networking typically you're going to have multiple access points in my house i have four different access points in this case though i gotta again go with the u6 lite there is no better bang for your buck than the u6 light i've done a lot of access point testing and at 99 bucks the power and speed that you get out of that access point is not comparable to any other access point that i've tested it's just far and beyond the best bang for your buck so you've got all of your wireless devices you've got any hardwired devices that you want and once again i also still recommend get these usw flex minis behind your television for your audio visual rack plug it in with poe power and then you've got four gigabit ports to power up your tvs and your rokus and your playstations etc so with this robust home network and the cloud key gen 2 plus you have a hard drive i think it's a one terabyte hard drive by default in that gen two plus you can upgrade that hard drive i think up to a maximum of about five terabytes but it's a single hard drive there's no redundancy in there and if you're looking to add some cameras to your home network protect is really really awesome except that especially with the default one terabyte drive that's in there you're gonna not have a lot of history when you have more than like three or four cameras right so if you're going to be going beyond three or four cameras around your house which maybe you won't but if you are going to you're going to quickly outgrow that cloud key gen 2 plus so now let's add in some surveillance and for surveillance i would recommend the ubiquity unvr it just runs unify os with unifi protect on top of it and that is dollars not counting the hard drive so that does not come with any of the hard drives the hard drives can be expensive you know an 8 terabyte hard drive can be something like 250 to 300 bucks so you're looking at probably another at least a thousand dollars worth of hard drives if you're gonna fully deck this thing out with like eight terabyte drives but it can handle a ridiculous amount of cameras i think it's something like 15 to 20 4k cameras and up to 50 1080p cameras so let's talk about cameras for a second notice this they're all sold out right so this has been one of the biggest problems with you with unified protect is it's very very difficult to get your hands on these cameras but these are the three cameras that i would mainly recommend for a home network and hopefully by the time you're watching this maybe two three four months down the road uh some of these will be available maybe our supply chain issues aren't going to be so bad in the future hello everyone in the future so the uvc g3 flex 79 1080p camera really great for outdoors because it's it's pretty weatherproof for small indoors or even i've seen a lot of people that actually do use these outdoors the g3 instant camera is 29 bucks so excellent value uh and then we have the uvc g4 bullet that is a 199 dollar camera but the big difference between the g3 or generation 3 and g4 or generation 4 cameras is that the g4 cameras including the g4 doorbell and the g4 pro can do the new ai detection right so they can detect cars they can detect people walking by and you do not get those same detection features with either the g3 instant or the g3 flex or any of the g3 generation of cameras so if the ai stuff is important to you you're going to want to go with the g4 series of cameras otherwise if you just want coverage the g3 instant is amazing the g3 flex is also a really great option especially for outdoor okay so there you have it a look at what i consider to be the best basic home network and the best robust home network for this point in time which is october 2021 but i'm just one guy and i have my own opinions what do you guys think about this network setup what changes would you make put those down in the comments below i'd be happy to read them i read every single comment that you guys write if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you give me a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this please click subscribe my name is chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 92,567

Rating: 4.8581667 out of 5

Keywords: Best Home Network, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, best home network setup 2021, best home network setup, best home network switch, best home network switch 2021, best home network setup for gaming, best home network router, best home network security

Id: xykFaoOSREg

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021