Optimizing Your Unifi Network

hey everyone cody from mac telecom networks in this video i'm going to show you how to optimize your unifi network a lot of people have been asking me how i do this and in this video i will go over some of the things that i do if you guys are new here please hit the subscribe button make sure to hit the like button if you'd like to hire me for network consulting visit www.mactelecomnetworks.com you can find us on instagram mac telecom networks and we have a discord server and i'll put the link in the description below the first thing i'll talk about in optimizing your unifi network is bottleneck so if you're noticing that you have slow speeds in your network you first want to make sure that you have a good enough internet connection and if you don't you may want to purchase a higher speed from your isp another bottleneck that some people don't realize on the udm pro if you're using these eight ports to connect to other switches these eight ports only have a one gigabit backplane the one gigabit backplane means you're sharing one gigabit throughout all of these eight ports and then for switch connections i have three generation two switches here what you're going to want to do you would want to use a dac cable or a fiber cable with sfps plugging in from your udm pro sfp port down to one of your s p ports on your switches so on most newer switches you're going to have s p plus which is capable of 10 gigabit links so from the udm pro we'll have a 10 gigabit link and then between our switches we'll have a 10 gigabit link you want to make sure that if in your middle switch you don't uh connect it with a copper connection between this switch in that switch with a one gigabit backbone in that case you're going to have a bottleneck from these other switches going upwards to your udm pro another way we could optimize our network within unify if we have the new gen 2 switches they do have something called layer 3 switching which is still in beta so we won't talk about it too much but how it works right now if you don't have layer 3 switching on you're going to be doing all your vlan routing through your udm pro so what happens say vlan 10 needs to talk to vlan 20 on this switch right here and we're on a host computer that is on this switch tagged with vlan 10. the vlan 10 will go through all these switches up to your udm pro it will make the routing decision and then go back down to this switch where we need to reach vlan 20. with layer 3 switching it will know all the routing processes and it will just route up to the switch so it's a few less hops to get to that end host and how you would create the layer 3 switching functionality on the gen 2 switches you would create the new network i'll just call it kodi and then put a vlan tag of 55 and then down below it will say your gateway type so the default will just be your default router whatever router that is if you're using the usg udm pro or usg pro 4 and then here it will say switch so then if you have multiple gen 2 switches you could specify which one will be the gateway the next thing we'll talk about is picking the right access points for your environment if you're going to be in a high density environment you're going to want to buy the unifi ap hd access points which are meant for high density environments with lots of devices connecting to it if you need a further away distance you're going to want to go with the uap ac long range we also have something that's called multi-user multi-in multi-out so this means how many radios are in our access point so within the unifi uap aclr there are it's a dual band radio which means there's two radios if you think about the access point as a highway you would only have two lanes of traffic so the more cars that are going down it the tighter it's gonna get packed if you get something like the uap ac pro you're gonna have three lanes of traffic as it has three radios in it and if you go with any of their hd models they're a four by four multi-user mimo which will give you four lanes of traffic one of the biggest thing within our unifi network is going to be our wireless network so we need to figure out what channels we want to put those access points onto so that they're not overlapping right now this is just three square boxes but this is my house so i have three levels of the house this is my top floor and i have an office right in this room and then there's another office over here and then there's a stairwell and then we have the master bedroom that's going all the way over here in my office i have a nano hd in the master bedroom there is a unifi ap ac light and then on the main level of our house in our living room i have a unifi in-wall hd access point and in the basement i have a unifi ap ac pro here we need to make our channel selection so that we're not overlapping three main channels on the 2.4 gigahertz band would be channel 1 6 and channel 11. so we want to make sure that these are never overlapping so my office access point we could set this to channel 1. the master bedroom access point we could put on channel six the living room access point we could put on channel 11 and now those are our main channels that we've used up so we want to make the basement access point as far away from channel 11 as we can so we will put that onto channel one and for our five gigahertz band we have a lot more channel selection that we could use so here you can see we have channel 36 40 44 48 149 153 157 and 161. they also have something on unified that's called dfs which is used for radar signals so military radars or weather radars you want to try to avoid using those channels if radar is being used you may get your connection dropped so the same theory goes so we would put channel 36 up here on the top for our five gigahertz band and then channel 40 for our master bedroom channel 44 for our living room access point and then we could use channel 48 for our basement access point so now i'll show you how to change the channel selection on your access point by default they're just set to auto so we'll start off with my office access point which we're going to put on channel one so you just go to config we go down to channels so the channel width that you want to use for the 2.4 gigahertz band will always be 20 if you go to 40 you will run into interference problems on the 5 gigahertz band you could use the 40 band if you bump it up to 80 that will give you more bandwidth but you may have larger interference issues so for the 2.4 gigahertz band i'm gonna go to channel and i'm gonna set it to channel one if you have a lot of access points within your home you may want to set the transmit power to low or medium right now it's set to auto i'm going to set mine on low as i have quite a few access points in a small area and then for our five gigahertz band we're going to set this to channel 36 and then we'll cue the changes and press apply so now we have to do that for each one of our other access points so our next access point will be our bedroom access point so we said this is going to be on channel 6 transmit power i'll put on low and then for the 5 gigahertz band we're gonna have it on channel 40 and we'll cue the changes the next one will be our living room access point which we're going to put on to channel 11 for our 2.4 gigahertz low power and then we will put it on to channel 44. and this is going to vary between home to home or business to business the best way to get a proper measure of how well your access points are working is to do a heat map and there are multiple different applications you could use i use netapp to do these heat maps unfortunately i don't have a drawing of my home or i would walk you guys through that process and the last access point we need to do is our basement access point so we're going to want to put our basement access point on to channel one and then low power and then for the five gigahertz band we will want to put it on 48 q changes a couple other settings that you may want to turn off if you're not using wireless uplinks so if you're not wirelessly up linking to another access point say a unified beacon hd you'll want to turn that off as it reaches out with a ping test and uses some air time so under your sight settings if you go to uplink connectivity monitor you want to make sure that is disabled if you are using wireless uplinks you need to have this turned on so we also want to make sure that auto optimize network is turned off so that it doesn't switch anything that we have already hard coded onto our unifi access point we want these to stay statically assigned to what we have found to be the best non-overlapping channels for our network so there is a feature within the wi-fi networks that is called fast roaming so what roaming is it means it will switch if you're walking around your home or business it will switch you from going from access point one to access point two as you're walking around fast roaming right now is still in betas we don't wanna have any beta features on as they're still working on improving them so anything that says beta i have completely turned off so threat management we don't have that turned on at all as i found it has been buggy and sometimes slows down my network a couple other things you could check if we click on the access point you could click on your channel utilization and just press plus you can see on the two gigahertz band that we're using channel six and the green shows that that's our rx frame so that's our receive frames the little bit of yellow shows that's our transmit frames and then this other yellow is our interference we could also do a scan to see what channels are most being used within our area so we could go over to tools and right here you could see it's an rf environment scan so we could do the two gigahertz and we could do the five gigahertz so if we press scan it will turn off our access point while it's doing the scan so we'll press confirm and it will take a few minutes to show us what is being utilized the scans now completed and you can see across the board it's pretty much the same so channel 1 6 and 11 we could use any one of those the lower the number the stronger your strength is going to be and you can do the same thing for the 5 gigahertz channel as well these aren't the best tests but these are something that could give you some insight into what is being most utilized you could also download the netspot app for free and it will show you every access point in the channels that are around you so if you have close neighbors it will show you the channels that are being used so if we go into the netspot app which this is right here you can see on all on the left hand side these are all the ssids that are being broadcasted in my area we can see all the channels that are being used for the 2.4 gigahertz band as well as for the 5 gigahertz band and we could see the signal strength and you could base your channel selection around this if you have lots of neighbors around you like i do most of them will be on channel one as that's what the isps provide them a lot of my neighbors as you can see it just looks like they're using their isp modem router one other very important factor within your unifi network to optimize it to make is to make sure that your firmware is always up to date so right now you can see that i have firmware updates available on pretty much every one of my access points as well as my switches that is because that is beta firmware i am up to date with the latest stable firmware that unify has posted so make sure you do that that's it for this video i will try to make another video showing heat map so you guys could see how those work with the netspot app if you guys like this video please hit the thumbs up button if you're new here please subscribe and hit the bell icon alright thanks

Channel: Mactelecom Networks

Views: 35,817

Keywords: Unifi, unifi channel, unifi channel selection, unifi channel setup, unifi wifi setup, unifi heat map, unifi heatmapper

Id: cm65vCkJDuE

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020