802: The Ubiquiti Universe

Hello and welcome back to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined as always by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Stephen. How are you today, buddy? I am good. How are you? I'm still recovering. I got some kind of cough thing going on, and I'm worried because I'm going on vacation next week. But I went to the doctor. I got drugs. I'm not going to be responsible for anything I say today.

And I'm going to be riding this cough button. Yeah. No, no, I got you. Because today we're doing something cool. A little housekeeping first, though. Our next episode, we're going to be talking all about the iOS. Mac OS 26, vision OS 26, man, I'm so glad they aligned the numbers. It's made my life so much easier. I think we need a universal term for it though. Like the. 26 operating systems or something like that, you know?

But we're going to be covering our experiences using the betas and what's working, what's not, new features we particularly like. So, yeah, we're going to be talking about OS 26.

You're right. Now we need a more combined name. And today on Mac Power Users, we're talking about Ubiquity and their line of Unify home networking products. This has been a... highly requested episodes so we're doing this today and on more power users which is the longer ad-free version of the show that we do each and every week we're going to be talking about basically where's apple

in all of this you know we're going to get into this but apple led the way in consumer wi-fi then they walked away about a decade ago and we're going to talk about that and maybe talk about how they could fit back in if they were to jump back in. So that'll be for members at the end of the show. Yeah. And you know, this whole episode to me is I am the skeptic of this episode because.

Maybe I should just start. I want to tell you what I'm doing with Wi-Fi right now and connectivity because I'm fine, buddy. I went and audited the house over the weekend knowing this was coming up. So I've got cable modem coming in and I'm paying extra to get, you know, a faster upload and download. It's not a commercial policy. So I know that like you've got faster speed than I do, but.

But it's fine for what I'm doing. And then, I don't know, about five years ago, I bought a set of three Eros. And they are the Wi-Fi 6 standard, but not the most recent Wi-Fi 6 standard. Over time, I bought a fourth one. So I've got one down. So the original setup is I put one downstairs and I had a 1600 square foot house. I put the one downstairs and two upstairs, one near each.

cluster of bedrooms for this. So the kids would have good coverage and Daisy and I would have good coverage in the room. When I added a 200 square feet to the house with the studio build out, I bought another one.

and have it here and i have run wi-fi i'm sorry i've run cat six is it cat six now yeah i think it's cat six yeah i've ran cat six through the house to each station except the one near the kids room where there just was no way to get it there easily so they're all wired except for one and then i put a big camera on the garage looking at the driveway

And I was having connectivity issues with that. So I bought an Eero extender. I didn't buy an Eero base station. And I put it in the garage, which makes it really nice when I'm in the shop. I've got good Wi-Fi out there too. And that helps also with the 3D printer. So I've got a set of four Eros plus an extender, and we have had better Wi-Fi than ever for the last five years because they just work. Now.

All of my nerd friends, including Mr. Hackett, are getting into this ubiquity thing. And I don't get it. I know a bunch of listeners feel the same way as me. It's like, hey, it's working. Why do I do it? But then I look at the outline and this is like so much more than I expected. So that's kind of my take coming into the show today. I just thought, well, here I am.

Can Steven convince me to go spend a pile of money on more stuff? Yeah. Well, we'll see. We will see how this goes. I don't think you can, honestly, because it works. And as long as it works, what do I care, right?

Yeah. But let's see. Let's see. So we do have some basics to kind of get out of the way first. So Ubiquiti is this public company. founded in 2005 by Robert Para. And usually I wouldn't talk about the founder of a company we're talking about, but I think it's actually really interesting in this case. He worked at Apple on early airport products.

So the first airport stuff shipped in 99 and the story goes and like, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but he says he had ways to increase their performance, but. He was frustrated by the management and the constraints of working in a big company. And so he left Apple and with his own money, started building access points and radios in his house. And then...

started the company on his own. He bootstrapped the company and he's done very well to the point where in 2012, he bought the NBA team in my hometown, the Memphis Grizzlies. Oh, wow. And that's cool. And our arena. Has so much ubiquity gear in it. And like, once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. And I found this video on YouTube of them talking about how they outfitted the FedEx form. That's our NBA arena here.

Truly bonker stuff, but it has sick Wi-Fi for games, which is cool. But because he came from Apple and a lot of people who work at Ubiquiti have filtered through Apple over the years. There's a lot of similarities. A lot of things that people like about Apple, like really, really nice packaging that is, you know, if not all, like mostly recyclable.

using aluminum and products like network switches. There's no reason for your network switch to be made out of aluminum, but it looks cool. And it, you know, it's, they've got like the Mac versus PC energy in their ads and their YouTube videos. A lot of kind of Apple DNA in this company. Now that also comes with some downsides. So they have some products named Pro and Pro Max. It's like, come on.

I'm going to copy Pro Max, like the worst name in Apple's lineup, but they have. But they've also used some like PowerPC terminology. So the camera generations are G3, G4, G5. And so I've got... some Flex G5 cameras. And if there's new ones later this year, there'll be the Flex G6. So when you're scrolling through these pages or the links in the show notes, you're going to notice some branding that feels familiar to those of us who...

who are tuned into Apple, which I just find kind of funny. Okay. So just to keep score, you're already like getting my attention that this is Apple DNA. That's like, Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. And we'll talk some more about that. I've got like a pros and cons list at the end of the outline. And so we're going to circle back to some of this. Ubiquity is the company Unify. is the brand for all the equipment we're talking about. I will probably use those terms interchangeably during this episode.

Ubiquiti has other product lines outside of Unify, but Unify is the main thing and everything that you would use as a home user. or a prosumer, or even a small, medium, large business is all kind of under the Unify category. Again, Ubiquiti and Unify, it's a company and then a line of products, but I'm probably going to use them interchangeably because most people do. So the first thing I...

wanted to say is i thought this was just wi-fi stuff but it's a whole it's a whole line of gear right it is we've got networking gear we've got cameras we have uh security stuff and there's a bunch of things i'm not even talking about like they have a whole they have a series of uh ip phones and ev chargers that you know tie into the network and you can control remotely and all those things

But I think they're definitely most well-known for their Wi-Fi, for their access points you can put in a home or business. That's where they started. That's still, I think, the main thing that they're focused on. But they have built out a bunch of other IT capabilities kind of extending from there, if that makes sense. All right. So how did you get into this stuff?

Yeah, so I ended up, I had older Eros. They all had a wired backhaul. So you mentioned that you've got Ethernet cables running to a bunch of your Eros. I had the same thing. All of mine. had Ethernet run to them, but they were pretty old. And when I was able to upgrade last year from Comcast to AT&T Fiber, so I now have... symmetrical so the same speed up and down 1.2 gigabytes per second and i wasn't getting anywhere close to that through the eros either wired or wireless

And so really my changeover to my faster internet connection is what set this off for me, is that I wanted to take full advantage of what my internet connection could do. And I had several friends, some locally. Hi, Kyle, if you're listening. And then friends online, like Marco Armit, who he's using this in the restaurant that he and Tiff bought. And so I had friends who were moving into this world or were already in this world who...

were able to help me make some decisions and kind of get it up and running. So it started as a project, actually on my sabbatical. When I was on my sabbatical, the AT&T lady came to my door and said, hi. We have fiber on your side of the street after five years. And I said, here's my company credit card. Give it to me. Yeah, no kidding. I need that lady to come to my street. I know.

Yeah, like my wife pulled up and she was like, oh, hi. Like, you know, because look, if someone knocks on my door, normally I'm just not going to answer. But like I saw it was the AT&T person. I was like, oh, oh, is this the fiber fairy?

And it was, she was the fiber fairy. Yeah. That's awesome. I do have some, some, some definitions. We just, I want to go through quickly because networking in particular. There's a lot of vocabulary and a lot of acronyms. And I just want to do my best as we go through today's outline to be as clear as I can. But I wanted to kind of put some of these out here at the top.

So some simple things like an access point. Well, an access point or an AP is just a wireless base station. So your Eero sitting on your bookcase, right, in your office, that's an access point and sort of...

unifies language or an AP. You've got a bunch of different speeds of Ethernet. You mentioned Cat6, but you can go Cat6A, which is most of what I have in my house. There's... cat seven basically you're talking about different speeds that ethernet can support really cat six or cat six a is more than enough for a home or a small office um

If you're pulling new cable, I would say 6A at the very least. I don't think you've got to go to like 7 or I think even Cat 8 is out there now, but like the speeds are getting pretty ridiculous over that ethernet. If you have existing cabling, you know. even cat 5e which is pretty old now will do one gigabit at 100 meters in length so if you got a bunch of old 5e through your house i'm not telling you hey you got to go rip all that out now if you want to go faster than one gig

you got to go to at least Cat6. But Cat6 cable, Cat6A cable, very easy to get your hands on, easy to work with. If you were having it installed, that's what people are using now, basically universally. The rule of thumb is if you're running cable, the cost of the cable is the least expensive part of that thing. So get the best cable and future-proof yourself as much as possible. That's right.

I did 6A really for the future-proofing. I didn't need the extra length that it afforded in my house, but I was like, well, the spool of 6 and 6A is not that much different. And I'm going to be in the attic fighting heat stroke anyways. I might as well just do this once. Yeah. And in the Unify world, Ethernet is not only data, but very often it's power. as well. So if you've heard the term PoE or power over Ethernet, what that means is the switch that the network cable is plugged into provides

power, at least 15 watts, but PoE Plus and PoE Plus Plus offer even more power. And so that means that your wireless base station, right? So the one that I have hanging here in my office, there's not a power cord. running to it it's just an ethernet cable and that allows you to install these things in places that are would be hard to reach with power if you're mounting them in a ceiling or above a ceiling or

you know, in a closet or something where, yeah, I could get a network cable to it, but gosh, to get power, I've got to run an extension cord and do all this and that and the other. PoE just lets you avoid all that stuff. Nice. And something I guess we should tell the audience is, I don't know, was it about a year or two ago, you started sending me pictures of you trenching your backyard. So you got serious about this job.

Yeah, I've got fiber running between the house and the studio because I had outdoor Ethernet cable run professionally and that cable was failing. And then I discovered they had not used outdoor cable. It's really... Really made me angry. So I buried fiber between my house and my studio. Look, fiber is a whole can of worms. And I'm basically just going to set it aside today.

You really only need fiber if you are looking at distances beyond what Ethernet can do. And Cat6A can do 10 gigabit a second at 100 meters. Most people don't need to go past that. But if you're doing a really large install or, and the reason I did fiber, is I didn't want it to be conductive because Ethernet's got copper in it.

And I buried this fiber in conduit near a tree linking two buildings. I was like, you know what? If that tree gets struck by lightning, I'd rather be safe than sorry. The fiber is not going to conduct any power. you know, back to the network. Uh, and so did I need to do fiber? Probably not, but was it cool? Yes, it was.

It is really cool. I plugged that thing in and it lit up and I was like, I live in the future. I can just see you saying that to yourself too. I believe it. Oh yeah. It was awesome. The words came out of your lips. That's right.

And my dad who helped me with the trench was like, cool. Yeah, it works. The last set of definitions I want to just talk through quickly are the different Wi-Fi specifications. So you have Wi-Fi 6. which you mentioned. Wi-Fi 6 will do about 10 gigabits a second, but that is truly best case scenario. In real life, you're not going to get anywhere.

near that for a bunch of reasons. Usually there's a wall between you or the thing or your device won't support that speed. And there's also a lot of congestion. 2.4 gigahertz. There's tons of congestion. Lots of things use that band, that sort of section of bandwidth. Five gigahertz is, allows you to go faster.

but is also pretty congested at this point. Lots of things use five gigahertz networking. And so Wi-Fi 6E, don't ask me why these names are what they are, was released a couple of years later. And that added... six gigahertz spectrum. Six gigahertz is awesome. It will go super fast, but it really struggles through walls. And so

My access points are Wi-Fi 6E and I only am connected at six gigahertz if I'm in the room. If I walk the next room over, I get dropped to Wi-Fi 6 and my speeds go down a little bit. Not in a way that anyone would ever notice, but because I did all this, I'm very in tune with how fast my Wi-Fi is. Yeah. And most Apple products in the last couple of years support Wi-Fi.

If you have an older Apple device that doesn't, it will just connect at Wi-Fi six speeds. They're always on the verge of being. Apple isn't always the first to the game when there's a new Wi-Fi standard, but they usually get there. Within a year or two. And then Wi-Fi 7 just started shipping last year. And it retains 2.4. five gigahertz and six gigahertz. But what it does is it makes the channel connection wider so you can go even faster. But again, Wi-Fi 7 really struggles.

through walls so you're going to end up back on 6e or back on 6 kind of depending on where you are in relation to your access point and it requires a wi-fi 7 device and those are not shipping really really all that widely at this point. In fact, I'm going to have a link in the show notes to the Wi-Fi specifications for Apple devices. And so you can see what is offered where. But it's just the iPhone 16 line that support Wi-Fi 7.

If you got anything older, basically it's, it's six E. So again, if you're doing this, you know, you could think about what to do in the future. I. Now, this has been a while now, and from everything I've heard, it is better. But I did initially start with Wi-Fi 7 access points, and I had a lot of trouble with them.

And so I swapped them out for 6E. I think that's behind Unify now. I bought them. They had only been shipping a few months, and I think there were just some bugs to work out. But I've heard good things about the Wi-Fi 7 since then.

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So I share a vault with my coworkers at Relay. I can easily manage who has access to what. And at home, I'm using 1Password for families with my spouse. And so we have our own passwords for things we don't share. But then there's a shared vault for things that we do so we can both get into all of our joint accounts. It's all really easy to manage and set up. And of course, because it's 1Password, it works great on any device I'm using.

So go to 1password.com to learn more and to sign up for a free 30-day trial. And when you do, you'll get 20% off. Once again, that's 1password.com. Our thanks to 1Password for their ongoing support of the show. All right, so what's next? Yeah, so let's get into some specific Unify stuff.

I want to start with like the sort of central networking gear. And this is where you run into some branding stuff. What Ubiquiti calls their routers, they call them cloud gateways. I don't know why they just don't call them routers, but. It's the same thing. It sounds more magical. It does sound more magical. And if you go to that page in the show notes, you will see there are lots of options.

for cloud gateways. And I will say I'm putting the U S store in the show notes. These things vary around the world where you are based on, like, I know Canada was kind of late to, to, to. wi-fi 6e approval and so just you know this this will vary around the world but uh we live in the states and so that's what we had access to with all of these product lines there are things to consider

And their website lets you filter through a bunch of different things. So the first thing to consider, I think, is the speed of your internet service provider and how much of that speed do you want to... pass through to your internal devices. You know, for most people, you're not going to go faster than one gigabit a second anywhere. But if you're fortunate enough, like I proved to be last year,

I did want to pass the full 1.2 gigabit per second through to my key devices. And so I needed a gateway, a cloud gateway that supported that speed both on the... WAN side, so the wide area network, the internet service provider side, and on the local area network side, because I wanted to take full advantage of that. Yeah, like even your switches and things. Anything that gets below your maximum bandwidth is a problem. Mm-hmm. That's right. Because basically you're trying to...

Avoid bottlenecking, if that makes sense. Yeah. You also need to consider what sort of form factor works for you. So they have some that are... pretty small that you can just, you know, like, so my network is in one of my kids' closets. And so I actually, the one I use is just sits up there on a shelf. But if you're installing this in a business and you have a rack.

They have rack mounted stuff. They have what's called the dream wall, which actually mounts to the wall and is very low profile, but it takes up a lot of wall space. So your form factor is an issue there. I always equate ubiquity with ceiling mounts because I note them in public places all the time.

Like, go to a restaurant or a store, and if you look at the ceiling, you'll see little ubiquity gateways hanging from the ceiling. Yep. Very common. It seems like that's a very common deployment in, like, public. Yeah. Yeah. So those are all access points. And the reason you have them on the ceiling is so they're up high and they're broadcasting facing downward mostly. But, you know, back backstage somewhere, right? Like somewhere in a closet and all those doors, there's.

a switch and a cloud gateway and all that stuff is kind of hidden away. You can also decide what features you want on your gateway. So Unify has several applications. that the gateways can run. You have your basic network application, which they all run. That's what lets you manage how all your ports are set up. And if you want to do any filtering on your network or you want to have...

you know, different security options, all of that's managed through the network application, but you can also use your gateway as a wifi access point itself. So some like the newer dream routers, they are. the router, but they also have Wi-Fi antennas. So maybe if you're in an apartment and you just need one access point, you can kind of get it all in one thing and not deal with a separate access point or a separate switch.

And then also some of them can support camera recording. So we're going to talk about camera recording in a little while. And you can do that either on a separate like network video recorder. Or you could do it on your gateway. So you can kind of think about what you want to have set up. how you want to do it, how integrated you want your gateway to be. In some cases, it's awesome if it's all just together in one. In other situations, you may want your gateway separate from your Switch.

separate from your Wi-Fi access point, separate from your NVR, just kind of depending on what you need. And the control you get in the network app, just as a sidebar, really is incredible. I mean, I just pulled mine up. as we're talking and i can see everything from my system uptime to the traffic it has this great thing where you can see what devices on your network in real time are

what they're doing in terms of the amount of traffic and the speed they're working at. You know, I can see that our living room access point, it does the majority of the traffic because it's in the center of the house. And that's where most of us are all the time. As in contrast to my office access point, it doesn't do very much traffic because I'm wired into Ethernet on my computer.

So the only things out here connected over Wi-Fi are some phones and iPads and stuff. And this is great because, I mean, it's just fun to see. But it's also really easy to troubleshoot something. So if you're saying, what is going on with my network? And you look at your homepage and you say, oh, gosh, you know, Backblaze is running at, you know, 100 megabytes a second. And it's, you know, taking up a...

a quarter of my, you know, or of my upload or whatever, then you can go in there and go find Backblaze and pause it somewhere. So it gives you a lot of information so you can make decisions about what's going on. And if I wanted to say, hey, I'm on a slower network with my internet service provider and Zoom and Teams are really struggling to connect. Well.

You can go in here and we're just really just a few clicks set up quality of service, which is very common in high end networking, but usually kind of hard to configure. And one thing that's really nice about. it makes it really easy to turn that on. And so I can tell my network, Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, whatever, if you sense that, if we're connecting to that, that gets priority.

And my kids streaming Netflix, we're going to slow that down. So my work call is as clear as can be. And it just gives you a bunch of these tools. And a really nice interface that you can manage from the web or manage from your phone and the network app. And it's giving you a lot of power that previous to systems like this.

We're basically locked away to IT professionals and like, oh yeah, I can do it, but I got to do it in the command line or something. No, no, like they have a beautiful interface that's really easy to understand and you can kind of see exactly what's going on and make decisions and change things over time.

Well, I guess that's the question. One of the questions I have is my understanding of ubiquity is it really gives you like commercial grade controls, even in your home environment, which. And you're coming from Eero, so maybe one question I'd have for you is how does that compare to Eero's controls? Because Eero does give you some of that, but it's all in the iPhone app. It's not, as far as I know, addressable off the web.

Yeah, Eero does give you some of these things, but Eero, it and Netgear and others, they're really geared towards, hey, I'm a consumer user, I just want to flip a few switches and let you handle it. For instance, Eero gives you, as far as I know, very little control, if any, over... how strong your radio signal is from your access points, right? They kind of figure that out for you, which is part of the magic viewer, right? Like this is me not downplaying your or other people in the market.

But one thing you can do in the unified dashboard is, hey, these two access points, maybe they're kind of too close together. You can see like it has a bunch of radio information and it will make suggestions of like, hey. let's turn the power down on this particular access point or a situation that I had. I actually had one too many access points initially because when I first set it up.

I just put an access point everywhere in Eero was because I already had Ethernet there run through the attic into these rooms. And I was having issues with the iPhones in particular not moving between access points. So having the information about, okay, like you have a lot of overlap here. I turned off that access point and suddenly I could roam from one end of the house to the other.

And it wouldn't try to be like holding on to to access point that was far away. And so it gives you that information and their support's really good and their community is really good to help you fine tune things. You know, Eero and others work by magic.

But if that doesn't work for you, you don't have a lot of recourse in terms of fine-tuning. And then I think the other question I have is, is it... is superior in terms of just internet quality because i mean it seems like every time i've talked to somebody that's into ubiquity they talk a lot about how i have so much control and i've got this great control panel but like does the internet sling faster in your ubiquity house

I mean, if I had Eros that supported the higher speeds, then I think the experience, right, of my wife just picking up her iPad to stream Netflix, it would be the same. She has not noticed other than the time and money I've spent. For her, the era was fine. This was more about me trying to squeeze everything out of what I was paying for. And needing a nerd project, honestly. But having... If you've got Wi-Fi 6E from Eero or Netgear or somebody else, if your coverage is good, I think...

most people would never really notice the difference, to be honest with you. And that's just good to know, right? I'm not saying that you shouldn't get ubiquity because you can get the same with Hero, but I think people need to understand that. And I think one of the advantages and one of the reasons I consider it is just the additional control, like you were talking about. Even if it's the same internet, if you've got additional control, you can actually make a better internet.

Right. So an example for me, cause I've got kids in the house is filtering and Eero and others offer, you know, filtering and say, you know, I don't want this or that, or. In Eero, you like add devices to groups and then you have, okay, well, this group is like family safe internet and these other devices can do whatever they want. But if you need, again, if you need to fine tune it, you've got a couple of options, but not a ton. In the Unify Network app.

You can do that sort of broad filtering, but then there's also just a text field and like block these addresses, right? And so I was able... uh, to go in there and, and I can tweak that over time as I, as I feel, you know, feel as necessary. Nothing I couldn't do elsewhere. Right. Or I could do with, you know, um,

Circle or like there's other solutions out there for filtering internet with kids in the house. But having it being built into what I'm already doing works really well for me. And so I've been happy to have that all kind of in one consolidated place.

So what's the gear you need when you start setting up? I mean, what do you need to buy? Yeah, so you need a cloud gateway. You need something that takes the internet from your internet service provider. So, you know. Cloud gateway. And then it kind of depends on what you're doing. So for me, I have a lot of wired devices, the Mac mini, the Apple TV, a bunch of stuff in my office.

And so the next level was, do I need any switches? So a switch just takes one connection. So one ethernet cable or one fiber connection. It gives you multiple ports downstream from there. And again, you've got a bunch of things to consider. Again, form factor. Do I want this to sit under a desk? Do I'm going to put it in a rack? Do I need it to be as small as possible? The speed.

So again, I'm trying to go faster than one gigabit. So any ports between my laptop and the internet need to support faster than one gigabit. So I've opted for 2.5 gig switching. where possible so the switches i use have a bunch of gigabit ports and they have a handful of 2.5 gig ports and that lets my network be faster than my internet connection so i'm not forming a bottleneck

And then I think the last thing to consider is, do I need power over Ethernet? Am I running any cameras or a doorbell or access points? off of this switch and so then i need to look at okay what are the power requirements i need is this particular switch you know what power can it provide across its ports One thing that I like about UniFi is several of their switches, you can actually pick a different size power supply. So if you don't need like the maximum power it can put out, you can opt.

for the smaller power supply, or if your needs change over time, you can just buy like, I think their big power supply on some of this, which is like 210 Watts. It's huge. Like the size, like the size of a sandwich. That's a lot of juice. But if you're doing a lot of access points or a lot of cameras, you may need that additional power. And what's great, I think, in particular about UniFi switches is they have actually some really cheap options. And so...

They've got these little, they call them flex, these little like flex switches. The flex mini switch, it's five ports. It itself is powered over Ethernet. So like the switch doesn't require a plug. It's powered from the network and it's 30 bucks. And so I have one of these on my workbench in my office. Like if I'm working on something, I just want it wired real quick. I can just plug it in and there's no like power plug or like a USB-C charger anywhere. It's just powered.

powered from the network and so you've got a lot of options and yes you could spend a lot of money on a switch but most people don't need to you know most people can get by with a switch that's 50 bucks 100 bucks 150 bucks and be just fine Yeah. And I think that's just kind of one of the things that comes with Unify and Ubiquiti is, you know, they make stuff for stadiums. So when you go to the website and you see a $3,000 switch.

that's okay. That's not for you. You know, I mean, if you're considering this stuff, don't get hung up on the fact that they sell super high-end equipment that you don't need. You know, one of the things, this isn't in the outline, but it's been kind of weighing on me personally, is... I've been growing up my network. You know, when I added the studio, I had to buy some additional switches when I got the increased speed because we got two.

gigabytes now with our internet so i had to buy 2.5 gig switches to to get the you know the that speed over the cable line but i always feel a little uncomfortable buying from these random vendors on amazon you know

And I don't really know the security story. Like if it's something that you're running all your internet traffic through and it was made by a malicious agent, that's not good. And like Eero doesn't make switches. So one of the things that makes me curious about Unify is I do like the idea of one company owning the whole, you know, thing from top to bottom, you know, you're kind of safe that way.

Have they spoken about like their security position and privacy? Yeah, absolutely. I'll have some links in the show notes to this, but in general, like their thing is like everything. We're going to do everything possible to be local to your network, right? So the network application, the cameras, door access, all of that is running.

locally on hardware that you control. Now it's up to you. If you want to make that accessible over the internet, I did because like, I would like to see if someone's at my doorbell, if I'm at the grocery store, right? Yeah. but it's up to you. And they, you know, like every other company, like years ago, they had a security issue. It was no customer data. It was kind of an issue with some of their software and they fix those things quickly.

They also do, I think, a pretty good job at communicating, hey, in this update, we're fixing this and this. That was a potential. security thing because a lot of their customers are enterprise, right? Like big companies that are running office buildings or stadiums or something on this. And so having that communication is something that's expected. in those areas. And so having that as an end user.

is something that's just not really a thing when it comes to like Eero or Netgear or other things like you see maybe what they patched in their software updates but they're not telling you advance they're not disclosing things they don't have a bounty program to deal with bugs So because Unify is a professionally used system, you gain a lot of that benefit being an end user as well.

So we've talked about gateways and switches. I do want to talk about access points. So we mentioned Wi-Fi 6, 6E7. You kind of got to decide what speed you want to go. There's a lot of overlap currently in there. ap lineup i think it's honestly a little confusing in places so i think it's again a matter of how fast you want to go the form factor you want do you want to are you going to mount these in the ceiling like mine are all mounted in the ceiling

Are you going to mount it in a wall? Do you just want it something sitting on your desk? Do you need it to be weatherproof? So I have an access point that I added in my garage. And the one I used is weather resistant because my garage isn't heated or cooled. Right. It's like it's basically the temperature outside inside the garage. And so I wanted to make sure that that thing could hold up.

That's kind of cool that you got that option, I have to admit. Yeah. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I think it is too. And you also have options around. So they have some that are more geared towards like, hey, these are really like long range access points. They might be slower, but you get more range out of them. That's where the Unify design system really comes in handy, their design center, where you can go in here.

and provide either the amount of square footage you're covering or if you have a floor plan, upload a floor plan and you can tell it, hey, this is a home or a school or whatever. And then you can say, hey, you know, it's easy for me to add, you know, add an access point here and here. And I want to put a camera here. What is my coverage going?

to look like and it will map it out you tell it what kind of construction it is and it takes some time but it means that you can make uh decisions about purchasing before you actually put the money down so you can go in there and change like what what would my access points or what would my coverage look like with the u7 pro which is a wi-fi seven access point versus

the uh u6e which is what i use which is the wi-fi 6e version of it like what would that coverage look like what kind of views are my camera's going to have and so you can see how it's going to work before you start in on an install yourself and that is really useful i can see why you got sucked into this man because just looking through the website it's like yeah that'd be cool so you need it's very um

component-based. It's like the old days of building your own PC, right? Oh, yeah. You've got to get all the pieces. Absolutely. I'm pretty sure I don't need an E7 Campus hotspot. I probably don't need that. But why not? Wouldn't that be awesome if I had one? You would have coverage for your whole neighborhood, I think. Yeah. It is weatherproof. It will take 10 gigabit upload.

Look, when your access point has an option in the box to mount it to an outdoor pole, you know you've probably made the wrong decision for your house. Got a little too close to the sun there. Who am I to judge? You know, go crazy, I guess. But yeah, and that's the scale of what they do, right? They do the E7 audience, which is a $2,000 access point, 12 streams of Wi-Fi, 5 and 6 gigahertz.

This is what's in the stadium, right? You're at a football game, you're at a concert, and you look around, you see an access point. This is what they're using, right? It has redundant networking. So if the switch is connected to dies or goes offline, it can route it to the other switches plugged into. I mean, that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

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But they don't still make Wi-Fi and networking gear. They've expanded. And you've gone down the rabbit hole of unified cameras, right? I have. So in this, I really wanted my cameras to store.

footage locally and i wanted to stop paying a subscription so i was using ring for a long time and ring has other complicated things we're not going to touch today but like ring's got some policy stuff you may like or not like um but you know it was a subscription it was dependent on my internet being up because it was you know it has to stream all of that all of that stuff up through

the cloud up to the cloud and then back down and i wanted it to be to be local and the one of the pros of unify i'll get to at the end is like You just buy the gear and it just works. Like you get updates. Like as I was preparing for this, they have a big update coming to some of their cameras on the software front.

And I'm just going to get it. I'll get a notification. I can choose to install it when I want. And suddenly my cameras have new powers because they just push it out to everybody, which is really cool. So that's why I went down this road.

So to store all the footage, again, you can use a cloud gateway that has, some of them have an SSD or a hard drive slot where you can put in some storage. And then you're running the network application and the camera application, which they call Protect. Protect is a lot of cool stuff we'll talk about in a second. But depending on your capacity, and again...

They have a calculator on their website. So you can say, I have four 4K cameras. I want 30 days of storage. I'm going to record 24-7. How much storage do I need? And then you could decide, okay, I actually need... a full blown network video recorder, or if you're putting these, these in a business, you may need the, the big, like the network video recorder pro, which.

I think you can put seven hard drives in as opposed to four. Or if you're, you know, big boy, you can get the Enterprise one that I think has 16 drive bays in it. And so you can... how much storage you have and that sort of thing. I use the network video recorder. I've got four hard drives in it and I have like, I think 60 days of storage. Yeah.

And just for reference, that's 300 bucks to buy the hardware that holds four drives. Yep. And I bought four drives off Amazon, whatever the eight terabyte ones were on sale. And so I did that. Yeah. Yeah. For that, you can use a spinning drive. Absolutely. Where do you keep that, by the way? It's in the studio in the other room. Okay. It's just sitting on a bookcase. How loud is it? The NVR is a little loud.

I put, I opened it and put quieter fans in it. If I wasn't recording in here, I wouldn't care, but yeah. All right. Record audio for a living. So, so you've got the NVR and then you've got. the cameras. And just like the access points, there are a lot of cameras, but you can do some filtering on the website based on the resolution you want.

the viewing angle you want so some of them have much wider viewing angles than others how you want to mount them so is it going to go in a ceiling is it going to come off a wall Do I need it to move, right? Do I need a PDZ control? So if you're in a warehouse and you want to be able to see a door, but you also want to be able to move the camera, something else happens. Okay, well, you need that.

for me in my camera purchasing, it was the wife approval factor. You know, I've got a couple on the outside of the house is like, she wants them to be discreet. And so what was something a little bit smaller? Yeah. The one on top of my garage is not discreet. Yeah. And you know what? And sometimes that's the point, right? Sometimes.

You want the big thing. And look, their PTZ cameras are enormous. It's hilarious. But if you're in that sort of setting, you can go for that. Most of these cameras are... So they're powered from the Ethernet cable. So you've got to have networking to them. You've got to have a switch that provides enough power over that cable. They do have a couple, though, that are Wi-Fi based. So one of the doorbells is Wi-Fi.

And they have these little like kind of small cameras. They just plug into like a USB-C power adapter. Power adapter is in the box, which is nice. Can't take that for granted these days. And so those are great if you just, you know. You know, maybe you want one looking in your living room when you're on vacation, right? To see what the cat's up to. And you can just like plug it in behind the couch and sit it on the table.

So something a little bit less permanent than some of these things tend to be. I do feel like if you go the unifier route, you've got to just accept that you're going to be running cable for everything. Yep. Right. I mean, isn't that kind of the thing? Yep. I've gotten really good at it. The last couple I did is like, you know, I terminated the ends myself. As I worked on the first try, I was like, I'm now a professional Ethernet installer. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So if I do this, you don't mind?

Coming insane with me that we're in cable, right? You know, I'm on the hook for helping Casey Liss do it at his house. So this is my new side project. Yeah, your plan B. And then the thing we haven't talked about yet that.

All the ubiquity people can't stop talking about is the software. Yeah. I really like Unify Protect, the camera software, for a few reasons. I like that it's local. All right. All the processing is local. And depending on what camera you have, you have.

different capabilities in terms of processing so mine i can filter by is it a person is it an animal is it a vehicle but some of them are really powerful in terms of, you know, I want to see every time a person with a backpack walked by the front door and you can just search for it in the protect dashboard and it'll pull up all those clips for you.

Uh, some, some of them have features where you can tag a face. And so, Hey, I want to see every time that Ben came into the office. Cause you know, Ben's always late and I need to, I need to keep, keep tabs on that. So lots of options around that, which is the searching. The searching is really powerful.

Something that drives me nuts with iCloud secure home video is that it downgrades all my cameras to 1K. Yeah. Like I have 4K cameras. If you take this into your own hands with a system like this, you get the benefit of that. the best quality, frankly, better AI management. I think that's definitely a positive of doing something like this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, most of my cameras are 4K.

And I'm storing, if I wanted to, I could store 1080, but I got all this hard drive. So I'm storing 4K footage and it looks great. It looks really good both at day and at night. The cameras I use have the infrared.

viewing for nighttime. One of the things I really like in Protect is the privacy options. So say that you have a camera. that's maybe in an office and you don't want to record what's going on on the computer screen. Well, in Protect, you can set up what's called a privacy blackout.

And basically you just draw a box around what you don't want it to record. And all it records in that part of the picture is black pixels. It's not an overlay that you could turn off. That data is not there. It is just black. Yeah. It's a great way. Or if you have, you know, say maybe I don't like cameras in the house, but say that you have cameras in the house, but you don't want it to see into the bathroom, like do a blackout. And also another great privacy feature is.

You can, most of these cameras have microphones in them. Say you don't want the audio, you just want video. You can set it up on most of the cameras. Where not only have you disabled the microphone, but that microphone is disabled until you factory reset the camera. So someone can't come in behind you who has a login to this and like turn the microphone back on.

I have made the decision that this camera, I do not want audio from. And so it is basically disabled until that camera is factory reset, which I think is a really, really nice feature. I really like that. Again, if you had a camera inside, maybe you wouldn't want the audio. If you have a camera inside looking out your front window, but you don't want it to hear what's going on in your house, that's a great way to manage that.

And you really can turn it into an alarm system. I see sirens and all the other bits here too. Yeah, sirens, some lights, all sorts of stuff. And the alarm manager in Protect. interfaces with a lot of that stuff, but it's also the interface for being alerted when something happens. When I was using ring. One of the things I ran into was the mode switching. And so Ring has home, away, and armed. I think it's what the three modes, basically.

And so I hijacked those modes because the geofencing doesn't work for me because my office is in my backyard, right? The geofence, it's the same place. And so I would arm the ring system. When I left the studio, so the security and the camera was on in the office, even though I was home, right? If I'm at home eating dinner and, you know, someone Kool-Aid man's through the wall of my office, I want to know.

What I've really come to appreciate most of all about the Unify camera system is Alarm Manager. So just like the network application, you manage this on the web. and you have a bunch if you're a mac power user this is going to sound familiar you have inputs and outputs so you can configure a trigger right so a sound movement uh

a face, a license plate, again, depending on what camera you have. Or you can have a schedule, right? So I don't need to know about anything going on in the warehouse from 8 to 5, but after 5 p.m. The schedule is going to say, hey, if there's a person in the warehouse after hours, I want to know, right? So another input. Target devices. So you can use your devices to say, this is how I have mine set up.

If no one's home, let me know if someone's in my backyard. If we're home, I don't care, right? Like, because it's probably the kids running around. And you can set these inputs, trigger schedule. device in action per camera so in the office i have a camera in the office it's set on schedule but the one in the backyard just looks at the back of the house

That's set by device. And so you can mix and match the inputs and you can even do like and or statements like if I'm home or if I'm not home and it's after 8 p.m., this should happen. You know, this sounds like shortcuts. This sounds like AppleScript. This sounds like keyboard master, right? You're putting triggers together. And then you have different outputs. You have different notifications.

Mine are set up for push notifications, just like Ring or Nest or something else, right? Someone comes to my door, rings the doorbell. I get a push notification. I see a preview. I can pull up the camera really quickly. If you wanted email alerts, right? So if you're in a business and you want the whole leadership team to know that someone's in the warehouse after hours, you can send it to a bunch of email accounts. If you have...

door locks, like Unify has door access, you can hook that up, right? So if Steven approaches the door, unlock the door. And you even have web hooks. So send a message to Slack.

when this or that happens. Interact with some other system, right? I'm not really getting into it today, but you can also bring a bunch of Unify stuff into Home Assistant. A bunch of this stuff is surfaced in Home Assistant. when i turn on the front light turn off the driveway camera right like you can mix and match these things and it is basically endlessly flexible, which is it's so much more flexible than anything I've used before.

Yeah, and I think that this is like an additive technology. Just like the idea, the value proposition of Apple is the more Apple stuff you buy, the better it is. You get an iPad and a Mac, well, you can airdrop. files between them. Like that seems to me like the feeling I get from this stuff too. Oh, absolutely. I don't need door access, but if I did, I would choose.

unify because it's going to work with all my other stuff, right? Like if I had a gate, uh, I do have a gate, but if I wanted a gate opener, right. That opened when my truck pulled up. but not when your truck pulled up, right? I can set that up. It all works together. And they really have done a really good job in the software of making that easy to do. It's a lot of stuff to manage. It's a lot of different buttons to flip if you want to really get into it, but it's all available to you.

Like an alarm manager now in the new version, there's even like a test button. Like, oh, did my webhook work? Well, I don't have to go walk into the warehouse after hours to see if it worked. I can just fire a test, right? Like things that IT professionals want. they're building in, they're listening, and they're improving over time.

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leader in consumer wireless, and then they walked away. So we're going to talk about what's going on with that, where we think they could fit in today if they were to reboot that product line. So you can learn more at the link in the show notes or go to relay.fm slash MPU slash join. It's $7 a month or $70 a year.

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Stephen, why Ubiquity? You've been talking about it, but it is a big deal. You're going to have to run cable. You're probably going to spend more money than you normally would. If somebody's listening... What's the good stuff and what's the bad stuff? Yeah, so some of the pros we've touched on, but flexibility of deployment, right? I can pick the gateway, the switch, the access point that meets my needs.

and mix and match. Basically everything works mixed and matched. I mean, you got to make sure like, okay, do I have enough POE? Do I have enough, you know, do I have, do I have the cable where I need it, but you can mix and match. The integration of network and security under one umbrella. It's really nice. One place to manage it. And no subscription to manage it, right? So.

In preparation for this, they announced Unify Protect 6.0, and I'm just going to get that as they roll it out over the next week or so. I don't have to pay for that update. I'm not subscribed to it. And in a way, again, it's kind of Apple-like.

uh i can buy the hardware and i can just use it and you know that breaks down a little bit with modern apple so maybe it was apple i was thinking about that it was apple 15 years ago um yeah there you go right i own the camera the camera will get better over time and you know eventually they'll you know, be an update that it doesn't apply to, but that'll be years down the road. I like I really like having my security footage stored on site. I can access it.

through the app or through the web because I have enabled that. But Unify does not have access to my footage. It is not stored on some Unify server in the cloud somewhere. It's stored. on spinning hard drives in my office. If my office burns down tonight, my footage is gone. You know what? That works for me because I'm doing it at my house, right?

And there's benefit to that too from a business perspective. If you have these all over a giant building, you would use all of your bandwidth uploading footage all the time. Like the reason companies in particular have footage on... premises partially is bandwidth and, you know, security reasons, right? I don't want, I don't want to be streaming the warehouse footage to ring, right? I want it, I want it on premises where I can control who has access to it.

Another great pro that I've really come to appreciate is the community of Unify users. They have official forums. They've got customer support. Uh, there's a bunch of activity on Reddit and there's like, there's even a discord for people selling used Unify stuff. And if I've had questions at times, like someone else has asked it and I can find an answer and that I really appreciate.

Now, in that online community, how many of them are consumer, like people using it in their homes? One of my fears of ubiquity is it seems like, yeah, if I have a stadium, I'll use this stuff. Do they really support homeowners and consumers? Yeah, I think they do. I think Unify kind of fell backwards into the consumer market.

And since then, they have done more things like, hey, if you just need like a $30 switch to put under your desk, like we'll sell it to you, right? They're going to sell plenty of $3,000 enterprise switches so they can make some smaller, cheaper ones for the rest of us.

But in terms of like the forums and the subreddits and social media and stuff, I think from what I've seen, a lot of those are home users. Because if you're building an arena, like you're probably working with Unify directly to design it. You're a professional network engineer. But the rest of us, we're just building our own little deployments for home or our small businesses. And so a lot of what I've seen online are people like you and me doing it for their doctor's office.

or for their home or their small company or whatever. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And then I think the last thing I'd put in the pro is that they do have those accessory. So I mentioned this on a recent show. The network attached storage device I use is from UniFi. I use the UNAS Pro. It's 500 bucks. You put seven drives in it.

Uh, it's got fiber and ethernet networking. Um, and it's awesome because I just wanted a box with a bunch of hard drives on my network, right? I didn't know what, uh, I didn't need to post it off a Mac and I didn't want to deal with a Synology. And so. Uh, they've got that, but they also have, uh, business, you know, voice over IP phones and they've got some digital signage stuff and a lot of things to like put things in racks and.

They even have internet modems, so you have failover. So if your Comcast fails, you can roll over to AT&T LTE for business-critical applications. So they are building out. other things in their ecosystem. But I think it's true that the networking stuff is still at the heart of what they do. And this other stuff is kind of additive past that. In terms of the software.

If you learn the networking software, does it generally give you the skills to use those other components like a network attack storage or is it kind of a different thing? A lot of their sort of terminology and design language between the products is the same. So the storage manager, so looking at how my hard drives look in my NVR versus my NAS is the same.

Right. So I've got the same rate options. I can see the health of the drives. The UI is all the same. So I think they've done a pretty good job at where it's possible making that easy to kind of move between between things. Nice.

What are the cons? The biggest con is the expense of the equipment. I mean, I've got over $1,000 into my network gear now. That's a lot of money, right? hard to justify for an end user i actually expect you to say more than that because like i'm thinking i've probably got close to a thousand dollars in my euros by the time because i bought a set of three and then i added yeah two more pieces to it and

Those are a couple hundred bucks, I think, every time you buy an individual piece. Sure. Actually, that surprises me. I thought you were going to say $2,000 or $3,000. Yeah, so my setup is the Cloud Gateway Fiber. which is 280 bucks. That's my gateway. I've got two Pro Max. There it is.

Pro Max 16 PoE switches, one of the house, one of the studio. That's how I'm linking the fiber between the two buildings. Those are my pricey ones. Those are $400 each. The one of the house, almost every port is full. Uh, and the one in the studio, most of them are full and I wanted 2.5 gig networking to critical things. So my, at my desk, my MacBook pro is hooked up to a 2.5 gigabit port.

that goes through ethernet, goes to fiber to the house, and then goes out my internet connection. So I am not bottlenecked at all at my desk. And look, I upload big files a lot at work. That was the point of this. All right. And we can agree. Mary's probably not listening to this. Sounds to me like you're, you're closer to a couple of grand. I mean, I mean, so that's $400 switches, buddy. That's 800 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe like 1500 or something.

Um, I'm using a couple of G five flex cameras. They're 130 bucks each. Uh, yeah, I may be closer to two. And then I'm using the U six enterprise access point. So I'm doing, I have wifi six E. I did pick up a couple of those used, so I saved some money there. Yeah. And then I've got the NAS and the NVR. So yeah, I'm probably closer to 2K, but you don't have to be. Yeah. Well, and to me, the cameras are like extra, right?

That's like a camera system is another thing from putting in a, you know, Wi-Fi networking system. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's actually not that bad. I mean, that's the thing that surprised me in prepping for the show. It's like, because I, you know, like everyone, you're looking at like, well, what would I buy? I'd probably buy the stuff Stephen bought, you know? Yeah. And I don't even think you have to.

the cloud gateway max is cheaper and can meet your needs. I don't have fiber. I don't have fiber. Yeah. Yeah. It's also 2.5 gig capable. Most people don't need the big switches I have. You could do the flex 2.5 switch, which is $200 instead of $400. Like, and again, you can mix and match the stuff over time. So if your needs grow, like you don't have to buy the big switch.

Because you might need it down the road, right? You can start with a smaller one and add the bigger one to the network app down the road if you need to really easily. Yeah. Well, it's tempting, but my system is working. you know that's the thing but at some point it will not be working you know five years turns to 10 years or whatever this i the euro system i have currently is not going to be the last system i ever own hopefully right

Because then that means there's something probably with me, not the system. But yeah, I mean, I really like your enthusiasm for it. The thing about Apple hardware was always that the software was so good that you could actually understand and run your network. And I don't get that from Eero. I mean, it's okay, but it's not like it used to be in the old days with the Apple stuff. And I'm definitely ubiquity curious. Yeah. Based on what you've told me.

Yeah. And if you've got someone that's working for you, especially at home, I don't think you've got to rush out and do this. If you're getting ready to start a business or move into a new office space, you're starting from scratch. Unify would be the top of my list of recommendations for you, right? For a small business, a medium business that is starting out or you have an aging network in your business and you need to rebuild it. I 100%.

Like Unify has my full, full recommendation for that. For a home user, it is a harder sell, right? And like, you know, you and I blend the line of like, well, my home is my office. And, but even then, like, I didn't need to go as hard as I did. Um, but you know, some of this also was like a fun nerd project and like, I've never worked with fiber and now I know much more about it. And so you can, you can mix and match these things. You can price it to what you need. Uh, but for a home user.

it is it is probably overkill for just about everybody well although you know we are mac power users and when you're when your home system is ready for an update Whatever you buy, if you're a power user, you're going to get a good system. You're not going to buy junky network gear because that just ruins the whole experience. So you're going to be up in this ballpark. I don't know. I think my takeaway is I am definitely interested. I like the idea of one system made by one company.

And I am definitely a little nervous about some of the third-party gear I've added to my system. I'm sure it's fine, but at the same time, is it? I like the idea of just like one company owning the whole widget. Obviously, I use Apple gear for the same reason. And the stuff isn't as expensive as I thought. I mean, I probably could put together a system for my house under $1,000 without cameras. Yeah. So yeah, that's Unify.

It's a big, sprawling system, but out of it you have a lot of flexibility and optionality, and it is quite the thing, man. I can go in here, I can see what all my ports are doing. That makes me happy. Yeah.

The other thing that's kind of fun about this that I kind of get from you is you're never going to have a network rebuild again because all you're going to do is update components of it over time. That's right. And so you don't have to like do the ground up build ever again. Whereas with the stuff I use every 10 years or so, I've got to just kind of start over. Right. So if I wanted to go to wifi seven at some point.

I could buy new access points, take mine down, plug them in and be good to go. Right. If, if I needed to put another switch in somewhere, I can just buy another switch. Uh, when you add new equipment, the iOS app makes it really easy to adopt that and name it and put it on the network. And so, yes, I can, I can grow it over time as my, as my needs change. Okay. Well, we'll see. I think I'm going to hold off, but it is tempting. Next time around, maybe. We'll look at it. I think the next time.

I need to upgrade. I'm going to look very seriously at this and price it out and do the whole thing. Because I'm also, Eero has been great, but it also sometimes just doesn't work, you know? You don't really know why, because they don't give you a lot of information. We still have trouble sometimes up in the kid's bedroom. And I think I'll have to probably run cable there. But that'd be part of this system, too, if I was going to do this.

I would be running more cable throughout the house. Yeah. All right. Well, we did it. We talked about Ubiquity and Unify. I'm sure we'll have some people in the comments and the forums. sounding off about how they love their unified gear or how it's total overkill and you should never buy it so that's always fun we get it all we're always willing to listen to you

And we have a feedback episode coming up. So if you're a big fan of this or have some other ideas, let us know. We'd love to include that as well. We are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm slash mpu where you can leave feedback and sign up for membership for more power users. Well, what does more power user get you? It gets you the ad-free extended version of the show. Today, we're going to be talking about Apple networking gear and that.

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