Comcast Gigabit Pro Prep - Part 1 Configuring a UDM-Pro Router & 10 Gig SFP Connection

hey everybody it's lon seidman and if you've been following me for a while you know that i've been struggling for many years with my internet connection here i have comcast service i've got no other choices even my lte 4g network nearby is verizon only and my tower can maybe get me about a megabit per second in both directions not very good now my cable connection might sound good on the surface it's 300 down and about 10 to 12 up but the problem is is that i upload gigabytes of videos every day and it takes a lot of time to get those videos uploaded to the various platforms that we send things to and additionally the reliability of my upstream connection here has never been good if you ever watch one of my live streams we very frequently have interruptions because the connection just can't stay stable enough for even a very low bit rate live stream now i've been complaining to comcast for years and now they're sick of hearing from me they are going to be hooking up gigabit pro service here for me in the very near future this is not a freebie i'm paying full rate for it but what it's going to do is give me two gigabits per second both down and up which is a substantial speed upgrade and it's also a direct fiber to the premises product this is available across many comcast markets you might want to look into it if you are struggling with bandwidth it's about 300 a month so very pricey but where i am they're the only game in town and this is the only way that i could affordably address some of the issues i'm having here getting my channel to function efficiently so i'm very excited to get this in here and i'm willing to pay the price for it because i have no other choices and probably never will so hopefully it'll all come together but when you've got two gigabits you've got to think about your home network environment because most of the time our ethernet is gigabit or less and in my home i've got gigabit all over the place but i can't support the full speed of this internet connection with my current stuff so in the first couple of episodes of this series we're going to be looking at the upgrades we're making within the internal network to be ready for the service when it arrives and then we'll of course talk about the service when it does get here whenever that is given the current pandemic we're under now the router we're going to use for this project is the unify dream machine pro otherwise known as the udm pro and i have been using unifi products now for many many years i'm a very happy customer when i was at my old job we wired up our entire facility with their access points and other networking equipment it is super affordable but has enterprise class features and now with these dream machine routers they are consolidating a lot of different products into one now the router that this is replacing is a regular dream machine from unifi it's a little cylinder device that they sent to us free of charge in full disclosure last year it's a great router there's nothing wrong with it it can handle all of the network configuration in my house as well but it can only handle about 850 megabits per second on the wan side coming in from the isp and of course we need something that can handle two gigabits which is why we're jumping up to the pro version here uh still though it's very reasonably priced it's well under 400 bucks most of the time and it will deliver the performance that we need and allow us to uplink to other switches in the network that are running at 10 gigabits and we'll get into the port configuration on here in a minute now i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that unify did send this router to the channel free of charge however all the opinions you're about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you're about to see before it was uploaded and i should also add that i have unify access points that i did purchase with my own funds and have been very happy with here on the network we did a review of those a few years back let's take a closer look real quick though at the hardware before we get everything installed the good news is is that even though this is a faster piece of hardware it will work with my existing configuration until that fiber optic line shows up so what you got here is an eight port gigabit switch this is a layer two switch i believe so we can configure vlans and a whole bunch of other stuff on each of these ports basically a smart switch uh next to it we have the gigabit wan port here and you're gonna say well lon you need two gigabits don't you and yes i do and the reason we went with the pro here is that it has some sfp slots here for faster connections so what we're going to do is plug the comcast connection when it gets here into this 10 gigabit wan adapter and that'll give us plenty of bandwidth to handle the two gigs coming in and then what we're going to do and we'll do this today is interconnect this router with my faster switches with a lan side 10 gigabit sfp and that should allow us to get the fast devices talking with the slower ones additionally this has a hard drive slot on it because this will double as a dvr for the unify camera system that they offer for security surveillance and whatnot so that'll be kind of a fun thing to play with a little bit down the road and they also have a little display on here too so we can monitor network activity without having to load up its control panel on the back there's not much to look at here it's got a built-in power supply there's also a another redundant power supply we could hook up which is their usp standard there in the back but we're not going to do that today we're just going to go with the standard plug plugged in to my ups now comcast will offer me a router as part of this deal but i really do prefer the unify stuff so we're going to say thanks but no thanks to that we'll just be running this one on the rack so what i'm going to do now is get this thing on my rack and boot it up we're going to export our settings from the existing dream machine router into this one it should be a pretty seamless experience wish me luck and hopefully soon this one will be up on the network and then we'll do some interconnections now i should let you know at the time i'm recording this video that my internet is down from comcast because we had a tropical storm roll through the area knocked out power everywhere except where i live for some reason but unfortunately comcast is down due to that power outage so we won't be able to make sure this thing is on the wan in this video but i will let you know in the comments when it does come back up i think it'll work just fine once it's configured all right so we've got it powered on and the first thing it asked me to do was connect to my network with the wan cable now unfortunately as i mentioned my internet is down and as you can see here on screen it is saying no internet is detected the cool thing though is that this is a touch display so i'm guessing we'll have some additional things that we can do with it now it is pointing me at their mobile app to configure things so we're going to try that first and see if we're able to configure the router here without an outgoing internet connection wish me luck so it turns out you do in fact need an internet connection to get this thing configured i was about to give up but then i realized i can tether my phone to a computer and then bridge it over the ethernet i'll do a whole video about that later so we're going to give that a shot now so what i'm going to do here is just load up the app on my phone and as you can see here it again found my udm pro we're going to click on setup and what i've done is i have bridged a connection in my equipment room here and i'm just going to plug this into the wan port on the udm pro here and hope that that will be enough to get everything up and running here so i just plugged it in and let's see if it can get connected this is probably not going to work given how lousy my connection is at the moment but it looks like it got on the internet at least and i'm going to go step through the process now of setting this up so we'll just keep plowing through this here and once this process is done uh what we'll do next here is export the settings from the existing dream machine and import them into this one and hopefully it'll just be an in-place kind of upgrade where we won't have to do much else let's see what happens all right so we're on my dream machines control panel right now and as you can see everything is good even though my internet is down at the moment and what i'm going to do here is go down to the settings gear icon and then what i'm going to do is scroll down to the bottom where we've got controller settings and i'm going to go to backup and here i'm going to have it download the backup from the last seven days that'll give us not only the configuration but also some of the logs from the last week just so i can kind of pick up from where i last left off we're going to let that file configure itself and download and then we're going to connect to the new router and upload it to that and hopefully everything will be right where i want it to be and then we can move forward all right so we're now on the udm pros control panel it looks just like the other one what we want to do though is restore the settings from the other device so that we can replace that one with this one so i'm going to go down to the gear icon here we're going to go into the exact same place that we were before on the other one the backup section and what i'm going to do here is just restore from backup and i'm going to choose the file that we downloaded just a second ago hopefully this is going to work i'm going to click open and send that file up it's going to ask me if i'm sure i want to do that and i am sure and we're going to do it and now the controller is going to restart itself inside of the device here and hopefully when this is done i can just swap out one thing for the other and we'll be right back up and running let's let this finish up and we'll see what happens when it finishes so we are now in my equipment room and as you can see the udm pro here with its awesome little display tells me that it has configured itself to the same network address as my dream machine now right now nothing is connected i've disconnected everything and we're going to start disconnecting things from the existing dream machine and plug them into the new router here now pardon my mess of wires cable management is on the docket i just move cables around so often that they very quickly kind of fall out of organization but we're going to do first here is grab this cable this is the cable coming out of my right now dormant cable modem you can see it just blinking there with no connection but what i'm going to do in the interim here is plug it into the wan port on the dream machine we'll see that light up it's not going to get an ip address because we have no internet but at least we'll get it connected properly now these other cables here will connect to other things so this blue one is connecting right now to my 48 port switch here i've got on the rack and i'm just going to pop this one into one of the existing lan ports there and that's going to bridge my network to the router so right now all of my internet traffic comes through this cable into the router as it does now and then i've got another cable here that is bringing in the connection from one of my computers namely the vmix system that i'm currently streaming from so i need to get a longer cable here to reach down to where the dream machine is i'm going to connect that up and then we'll jump back onto the desk and see if everything is working properly alright so now we have the new udm pro up and running on the network with that configuration restored the original dream machine is unplugged now and i think we're in good shape you can see that it sees three access points on the network i'm just going to click into this to make sure my three have been adopted successfully and it appears as though those are now part of the controller that's built into this which is great now before you might have seen that we had four access points listed and that's because the original dream machine i was using had an access point built in the udm pro does not have a wireless access point built into it so we're back down to three but that's all i was using before so i really haven't lost much here so that's good i'm just going to go back a notch here and check out some of the other stuff that we can look at here now we've got our switch which should have more ports than we had a little bit earlier so the original dream machine we were using had only four ports it was a smart switch but it was just four this new one now has a few more we've got the eight gigabit ports and then we can also add in that sfp port which we'll get to in a few minutes and you can see right now that i've only got two of those lan ports occupied but we are going to get that sfp going in a second to connect up to my 10 gigabit routers or switch so all good here so far uh what i want to do next though is check and see if all of my routing rules are intact still so let's take a look in the configuration for that so a couple of weeks ago we did a video about creating vlans on unifi hardware and isolating those vlans from each other the firewall rules that i set up during that video are intact here and i also looked at the networks that we set up in that video and as you can see those networks exist as well including their vlan tags so i think this configuration carried over really smoothly from the original device not much to do here we just need to wait for my internet connection to come back up but we're not done because i do want to bridge in the high speed network switch with that sfp connection let's take a look at how we're going to do that so there's a lot of different ways you can make these sfp connections what they are are basically little cards that sit inside of the connector so what you can use are copper connections like we're going to do here that are directly attached to each other you could also get a sfp to fiber adapter which would run fiber optic between two points and they also have sfp adapters that allow you to plug in just rj45 ethernet jacks as well but i figured hey if we're going to go a short distance why not just get the cable all inclusive and that's what we did here this is about 20 bucks not that expensive and can support the 10 gigabit speed uh so what i want to do now is connect one end to the new udm pro and the other end to my 10 gig switch and let's see if it can make the connection okay so let's plug these in now i've never actually connected up these sfp connectors before so hopefully i'm going to do it correctly that feels like it's in there and now we're going to do the same here on the other one and just push that in until it connects now what i should see here is these two lights lighting up green which indicates that we are getting a 10 gig connection between the two so we've got one end in here we've got the other end in there and it looks as though we've got some communication going on here now we're going to do is go back to the control panel and see if it's showing up correctly so we are now back on the udm pros control panel and if we go over to the switch option and take a look at the ports we'll see that that port we just connected port 11 is communicating with the switch that we connected to it at 10 000 fdx that is essentially 10 gigabits per second full duplex meaning that it can send 10 gigabits out and get 10 gigabits back at the same time and if we look next to it that is the connection to the cable modem that's running at 1000 fdx meaning gigabit full duplex now of course my current cable connection doesn't go up that high but that's the speed of the connection over the network to that cable modem and then if we look over here you can see our other lan connections we've got that port 3 which is connecting up to my vmix workstation that's running at a full gigabit and then the connection to the main switch in the house here is also running at a full gigabit so all is good now when the comcast hardware arrives we're going to plug their network connection into port 10 here with another sfp connector and we'll disconnect the ethernet connection going to the existing cable modem but that's still a ways off now the next stage of this project is getting multi-gigabit connections to work in a few key places around the house and studio so i've got a couple computers down here that i want to connect up to that two gigabit speed and i've got a secondary office upstairs that i use in the evenings to get some work done that i would also like to have at the maximum speed now the problem before has been that multi-gigabit switches are very expensive that 10 gig switch cost me quite a bit in the closet over there but qnap the makers of network attached storage devices are coming out with a low cost two and a half gigabit switch that should be exactly what i need for the room upstairs and again a few spots down here in the basement as well and i'm doing that because i only have cat5e wiring running through the house right now so i'd like to avoid having to install any new cabling if possible so we'll put it all to the test when that gear arrives netgear is advertising that cat5e is fine for 2.5 gig connections and again we'll find out for sure when we are able to start testing everything here on the channel and i will bring you along for that experience when all the gear shows up so lots more to see on this i'd love to get your comments and suggestions down below because you've already been a big help in crowdsourcing some of the different components to this we did discuss this topic on a weekly wrap-up a few weeks ago and that was a great starting point so take a look at that video you can get more details as to the connection we're getting and what it entails and i'll be back soon with part two once those two and a half gig switches arrive and we can get those attached and hooked up to different parts of the house lots more to see here stay tuned and until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters tom albrecht chris allegretta david hochman brian parker mike patterson and bill pomerantz if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don't forget to subscribe visit lawn dot tv s

Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 32,202

Keywords: Unifi, UDM-Pro, dream machine, Comcast Gigabit Pro, 10 gig, 10 gigabit, SFP, SFP+, 2.5 gigabit, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: XfH72Ko0VZI

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020