Pro Networking for a Beginner 🌐 How to Setup Ubiquity UniFi Express

this new tiny UniFi Express is a perfect entry point device to the UniFi OS it's a Gateway controller a Wi-Fi 6 router all for only $150 even if you don't know what that means for most of you it's perfect for your house especially if you have a lot of Wii smart devices it's perfect for your Airbnb to manage that remotely and not have to get an IT guy out there it's also perfect for a coffee shop or a small business office even for remote employees who want a simple and secure way to access the local business Network to get access to the Nash drive for example in this video I'll show you what comes in the box stepbystep instructions to get the UniFi Express set up even if you never set up a device like this before my name is B spery founder of Apex One tech all my content is free to all I ask is you subscribe and smash the like button what is the UniFi Express like I mentioned it's a UniFi Gateway or a controller it runs the UniFi OS and UniFi OS is just like an operating system for your network and other connected devices like IP cameras right security cameras so that runs locally it allows you to control the network and all those other devices connected to it UniFi devices on the web or also on the app as you see here in this screenshot and we'll go through the setup here but just so you know what it is it's also a Wi-Fi 6 Access Point think of as a router so it is a router and also sends out the Wi-Fi 6 signal it's one of several UniFi gateways so up top here they actually show you other ones some of these are a lot more expensive like the dream machine dream wall the next one up that's actually only $50 more expensive is called the dream router here or UDR has a couple more features a little bit better but one of the biggest problems is that you cannot buy it anywhere or at least not for the $200 price the UniFi Express is just the cheapest way really to get into the UniFi ecosystem what I would call kind of like the Apple ecosystem all right if you want to add on more devices or you could just use the UniFi Express by itself and the UniFi OS is just so featur rich right that's one of the main benefits so there's a lot here's one setep this is the UDR dream machine for example and there's a lot of control you can you know cycle devices restrict certain things very good Security on it okay so this is just kind of what it looks like um overall there's a lot more features here we're not going to go into it here uh but just so you know what the UniFi OS is and as great as this is and again it's going to work for most of you just this one device it has some limitations like if you want to add more unified devices to it like manage switches then it's only limited to four more devices okay and you can actually even add on these and create a mesh Network sort of like what's shown here and here they show you just all the features of UniFi OS like I was showing you earlier so you can go through this and I'll include the links for for this okay and here's some of the specs so yes it has a w and a lan Port of course for gab ethernet powered by user BC like we mentioned Wi-Fi 6 so one of the benefits here and one of the reasons we'll be installing this here is that can handle 60 clients quite easily okay it says 60 plus which usually means concurrently it can handle 6 60 very well it can handle more but 60 for sure just as a comparison something else like a net gear Nighthawk router that you might have so actually this device right here okay very typical CD a lot these net gear routers that's a Wi-Fi 5 it can it's a dual band which which means comfortably it can handle like 30 devices and so if you have a smart home with Wi-Fi devices and or a lot of people come over to your house it can really start your struggle so this will be a pretty good replacement for it the square footage is about the same so it covers about, 1500 square ft with one of these no no problem and as it says here if you want to cover 3,000 to 4500 square ft you can set up two or three more devices and actually set them up as a mesh Network so Wireless uh but you can also route them together if you need to this shows you what a mesh Network could look like okay so one of these is connected to the actual internet through your modem and the rest are just plugged in through Power and you'll want to do this if you just need to cover more there's also a data sheet here with all the details if you need that the link will be in the description and it also has a installation guide but I'll walk you through it exactly how to set this up even if you never done this before right after we unbox it all right so this is the UniFi Express comes in a box like this it's very appol esque as you'll notice if you're not familiar with UniFi and ubiquity so you just pull this tab to rip the plastic you don't need any any scissors comes in one of these tight boxes and you just pull on the lid and the lid removes nicely and the device is right there looks very much like an old Apple router but nice design feels pretty good in the hands we'll find this tab here to remove it and then we have this inserts right under it has a QR code to download the app Android or iOS which you will need for setup cuz it's done via Bluetooth that'll be the easiest and it has this power adapter usb type-c it's just a 5vt 3 amp and it only uses 10 watts Max by the way even though it's a 15 watt adapter just remove that cable tie and you see there's the USB type-c and the last thing in the box is this RJ45 ethernet cable very nice one from UniFi has these flexible ends kind of keeps this position also gives a strain relief so pretty nice like a 1ot cable and that's all just for a size comparison here's a newer 2023 Apple TV so about as you can see roughly the same shape okay 4x4 Cube just side by side so we have this LCM screen right in the middle just gives you what you need to know even when you're setting up it'll say hey let's download the app and on the back side we have the Ran So it comes in from the modem here and another RJ45 out a lan and the USB type-c to power it up right here and then a little reset port for factory reset okay so first thing here is we just get the USB type-c connected to power all right and then this will go into the W Port just like that and then the other end goes into into your modem so if you're replacing your old router you see where your router is plugged in into the modem and plug that in there then as it powers on take a couple seconds okay so it's booting up and it's telling you right there download the app to get started all right so we want to go to ui.com and then click here and you want to create a account okay so sign up we made the account and we'll be setting up the app now just to be clear we're making this as a new network system which would be the same as if you're trying to replace your router okay we're not adding this on and even if you are setting up a mesh system like this this is still the first step you set up the first one that's connected directly to your modem which is why what I've already shown you right we've connected both of these just like that and now let's continue on the mobile app okay so let's open the UniFi app and the first time by the way is going to ask you about bluo Bluetooth Wi-Fi okay make sure you allow all those settings so right now it actually already found our plugged in UniFi Express one thing to know is it's saying initializing so it's still setting up and one thing we can do here is ready go ahead and sign in so I'll sign in here okay so it's still initializing the device and it also has the same loading bar on the LCM the tiny little display on the device itself okay so now it's actually ready let's click setup okay so it's connecting okay so here we just need to name the device and we'll keep it as it is unify Express if you're doing a mesh setup maybe you'll want to name this one as the main okay or something like that we'll just keep as UniFi Express okay SSID to make this easiest and to keep your network working fine you should name it this is the name of your Wi-Fi so name it exactly the same as your previous one most likely is what you'll want to do and the same password as well so I'll go ahead and do that then click connect so now it's communicating with the ISP your internet service provider so like Comcast wave AT&T whatever you have okay so it's actually you might run into this problem it's not liking our modem right now so easiest thing to do here that will probably solve this is just go and restart your modem okay and try again then we'll click test connection so let's go ahead and do that okay okay so that did do it for me just restarting the modem and now it's it's continuing so saying about 2 and 1/2 minutes left and actually as you wait this is a pretty good overview of what I can do so vpn's no problem pretty good built-in security and you can access it right there unify.com that's exactly where you go to remotely manage or even locally manage the router or Gateway okay you can also add new networks if you need a separate one you need a guess one all those settings are in there and a lot more you can control things per device of course it's great if you have kids and you can control their devices as well okay so setup is complete so let's join this wi-fi network just click join okay we are connected okay and let's do some setup here so just settings for the UniFi Express so first we'll start in the mobile app and then we'll go on the web so first if you tap on the top that's if you have any other network systems set up this is where you can switch you should just have this one only this UniFi Express or whatever you named it so maybe one thing uh we can do here well let's go ahead and add a new Wi-Fi so we can go to settings Wi-Fi and just because our last one had the 5G signal separately we'll do the same thing here so just want to make sure my last devices connect properly okay and some other things we can do here so if we go to advance ADV configuration manual for example I want this one just to be the 5 GHz okay no limits and that's about a so this is pretty basic if you just want to have a maybe a separate Wi-Fi let's say you're setting one up in your coffee shop or something Boutique U Barber Shop you may want to have one that's just for you and another guest one well the guest Wi-Fi is a little different here but let's let's just do that for here and just click save apply changes okay so just quickly some other tabs so clients just so you know if if you're new to this clients is essentially your devic is connected to this gateway to the UniFi Express and most likely to the internet okay so these are UniFi devices down here the second tab okay this is like if you had a manage switch on here or anything else like that and then here are just clients okay so device is connected and it's going to take a moment there's a lot of there's probably like 40 devices here in this home but they should populate here okay and it might take a minute for all them to catch on okay so now we have a couple more clients online now as you can tell so if you click that middle icon at the bottom you'll see you can see all devices connected or clients and it's really nice it really picks up and you can tell what's connected so like a nice little graphic icon for you and that fridge even gets exactly right some of these things are still coming online I think you'll it'll update that so you can see it that way you can also go here to the main page and go to topology this actually shows you kind of the setup so this one's very simple right we have the internet goes to the modem then the UniFi Express and then these are all the wireless connections so there's even a couple more that's still are not there so you could turn some of these off if you need to you could color code it also if you need to do that okay so this wi-fi experience just overall is going to give you like a percentage on there it also will show that on the display on the the unit itself so by the way this might be mirrored here but that's just a little display going on there so it can it shows you speed and how many clients are connected things like that and if this was set up as a second device it will just show you the strength that it has going back to the main device you can just see what's been using the most internet so I just uploaded a video from my MacBook for example right so it's showing top right 270 Megs uploaded and right we can see what has a poort connection right now okay so this unified Express is not in the middle of the house yet but we'll we'll put it there and I'll show you what that looks like as well cuz we can actually map out the entire house and see the signal strength so I'm back here several days later I let this new system run for several days just so I can report back to you guys how it's looking so apart from the UniFi app we can also go to the UniFi site manager and that's UniFi . ui.com and when you go here first you're going to have to log in with your UI account you'll have your UniFi devices or site manager different sites shown here so you should just have your one that you added the UniFi Express and this is just the model number ux and then this is kind of the core here that's really running UniFi OS and what applications do we have we just have Network so there's other ones here but I just to keep it simple uh the Network's running on here so we can go ahead and click on this so you'll have here all the same settings as the app but here you'll just have a lot more right so this nice dashboard it makes you kind of look like you know what you're doing even if you don't that's fine so you won't need most of the things here let me just point out some things okay so this is just a dashboard overview know where's the traffic going what kind of Wi-Fi your most active clients here so in general you can see if everything's green here your internet health is doing well so some things maybe to point out there's this topology here that we can look at which is just your network kind of system okay so these are the main things and right now I have it filtered right we're getting the internet from Comcast through a modem and to this Gateway from UniFi here and these show some things that are physically plugged in and that's only because I have a filter here so you can click here right and you can actually show everything right show all clients I can turn them off and just see any UniFi devices I have or maybe just the wired ones and then you can click this to see you know where your traffic is actually flowing it's kind of all relative so maybe I just want to see my 5 GHz devices right and how that's going so that that's kind of cool you can turn this on or off okay so maybe next thing here is the client devices so you see we have about 37 so this is on the lower end for this location typically there's like 4 40 plus I'm just the only one here right now so with these devices actually doing quite fine no issues of anything dropping you're not connecting to all right so you can get a lot of information here like specifically where like let's check my MacBook for example right this is just was disconnected here okay so you can control a lot of things here you can set up different profiles so that's more you know Wi-Fi limits there's a lot to get into this is just an overview maybe some good settings that might be useful to you you can go here to settings and some things we can do here for example you can set a profile so maybe groups of devices that you want to control this is more useful if you maybe want to control it like for your children or something okay so you can create these IP groups of maybe certain you know you can get the device IP address back from here from client devices and make a group and just call you know kids devices or something right so once once you make that you can then go to security and you can create traffic rules okay you can even you can make the internet turn off at a certain time or just block certain apps or groups of apps right so say we want to block an app we want to BL block uh Tik Tok right no Tik Tok for you kids okay and then right you can select particular devices or if we had an IP group we could select that here let's say that one right and either every day I mean always every day and you can set time frames there okay you can just add the rules but for example maybe if you don't want to do that what you maybe want to do in general here is do some country restrictions for example so turn this on let's block it both directions and maybe we don't want any traffic coming from China at all for instance right save okay China's blocked this ad blocking I wouldn't use probably something better to use just like the ad block extension okay and apply changes so this will a lot of things that you change here is going to kind of restart your system and you know you're going to lose internet for a couple minutes there so just FYI and that's about it everything else you know system there's going to be updates if you go here to your OS it'll notify you as well if there's updates so just update it as you need to let me actually show you one more thing just in comparison so you know so this is the UniFi Express right that we're looking at here we have for example the UDR so the dream rou the one's a little bit more expensive but as you can tell under security suspicious activity it has this setting which the UniFi Express does not so just something to consider it has a little bit more um Advanced filtering that you can kind of just turn on and forget about in a way so that just maybe one of the differences here if you kind of go for a a higher model otherwise what the UniFi Express has here will work quite fine and that's about it here okay so here I use the UniFi Wi-Fi Man app to get a coverage map for this house and so this is A500 squ ft exactly what this device is actually made for so this kind of gives you a heat map and the down there dbm it shows you the strength of the signal okay so let me walk you through this okay so what you see right here where my mouse is this is really the house okay mostly rectangular and there's some that I scan on the outside okay so the UniFi Express is actually right where my mouse is in a closet okay actually right there kind of where you can see that it's all green so it's not in the most ideal location it is kind of tucked away up high in a closet so as you can see once I start spreading out this is like the living room dining room kitchen here right it really starts to degrad in the kitchen and then here's a bedroom right here at the top left and it really degrades there and then a couple more bedrooms here okay so bathrooms and stuff so this is again, 1500t this is the entrance and then this is a garage right here so overall I mean it has the signal right up here in this bedroom kind of went pretty low into like the 80s it's kind of considered you know if you're looking at your phone at the bars like we have here the three bars it usually kind of goes down to two bars when you're like minus 75 plus 76 dbm okay and that's like right on the edges here of this 1500t home so another thing to point out here is that this right here is already on the outside okay this is all the side yard right here on the right and I actually have to go separately and then record a backyard back here so one thing to notice though so this was recorded on the 5 GHz and if you know about Wi-Fi right 5 GHz more bandwidth kind of like a like a highway road with more traffic Lanes right more cars can go through at once but it doesn't go as far so when you want to go a little deeper into the neighborhood right you kind of it'll it'll switch to the 2.4 GHz Which is less bandwidth but it goes further out so you can actually see that happening when I went outside see the signal actually dropped pretty bad it was red here but then it got better cuz it switched and I can see that switched to the 2.4 GHz Network okay so anyways this shows you that the coverage is pretty pretty good even the 5 GHz you know it does this thing if I wanted better coverage I would probably move it from this closet here where the TV console is uh there just less things in the way but for me this works okay I don't I don't need a super strong signal in the better room or anything like that so that works and and in the backyard uh let me show you that actually all right so this is the kind of outside and garage scan so at the bottom there that's the interior of the garage then I walked out side yard into the backyard so you see the same kind of effect here where the at first as I walked further up the signal got really red right much worse and then it switched to the other uh Wi-Fi antenna and so everything was great okay so it does cover at 1500t house uh quite fine maybe not all the way in 5 GHz but the interior is was fine it just when you kind of go outside then it might switch over to the other Wi-Fi okay so is this UniFi Express for you right so it'll depend if this is definitely the cheapest option to get into the UniFi OS into this ecosystem if you want to so if you have 1,500 foot as we saw it does cover it well and as you kind of can see in these images if you need more coverage you can actually add more of these units so this is great if I'm telling you about these other apps that you can get for it but you don't need to you don't need any of these other ones like the cameras from them or access control that you can add on to their other UniFi gateways if you don't need that then this is fine right it's going to give you good coverage if you need to connect other things physically you know you're just going to add a port sorry Add a switch from that land port that it has okay so for most of you if you're at home this will be just fine if you have like a a small business right 1,500 foot again it'll be decent you can do still a lot of control a lot of firewall safety that's built in here which is one of the main reasons people get into UniFi okay has all that built in without any subscriptions or anything like that and you know again if you're maybe have a some kind of barber shop or something you can easily set this up very easy to set that up and also control it remotely and keep your guest Wi-Fi secure and things like that coffee shop also work fine and if you're a small business and you expand right maybe this works now but you're concerned about okay what if I grow well you can just add another device and you can do so wirelessly right it's not the best for meshing which is when you kind of have these two Wi-Fi routers and they're not connected with the ethernet cable because it's just a dual band and basically means that it uses one of the Bands as a link back to the main kind of Wi-Fi router so there's Tri band systems out there that are a little bit better if you really need a meshing and you can't connect physically but it's always better to connect it with a cable I would say though if you do have the money and you might think that you might need a couple more ports on the back maybe you have some IP phones that you want to run from this or some cameras and you do want to test out there like cameras like it shows here then you probably want to get the UDR unified dream router okay it's again depends if it's available it's only $50 more but the fact of the matter is right now you just cannot get them it's been like that for quite a bit of time so they're usually running like $300 but if you can get for $2 200 yeah I would probably just recommend if you're a small business most likely a dream router will be better for you and it can just run more things right so if you can get your hands on this for $200 I would say go ahead otherwise stick with the UniFi Express it'll do everything that you need hit the like button and subscribe if you learn something new if you have any questions about setting up the system just post it in the comment section below there's also some contact information in the description helpful links and where you can buy this this was not sponsored at all this is just my personal honest take and this is what I do I always set up UniFi systems rather than net gear or ORV or anything like that okay so if you're looking for a system that's really upgradeable kind of can withstand the time I'll say UniFi is the way to go I'll have some other helpful videos for getting set up with UniFi here some playlist that you can click right up on the screen and again thanks for watching take [Music] care

Channel: Bogdan | Apex One IT

Views: 21,524

Keywords: ApexOneTech, ApexOne Tech

Id: iLHr_Aq27k4

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024