Networking at its finest

Its been a while since my last post. I have been super busy. After a few complaints from my fellow network users, I decided to undertake a major upgrade of my home network. Like all things it took a lot of preparation. I had a perfectly adequate Google Home device managing my home network, I had bought a few extra wifi units but their coverage was poor, mainly hampered by where I could position them as they had to be plugged in and in a good position to connect via a mesh network. Also I had to have one in our back bedroom so the appliances in the small shed in the garden could be on our network. First world problems. Although this was working, the connection speeds were low, around 50Mb/s unless you were pretty close to the main hub where you might get speeds of 200-300Mbs. My ISP is a 1Gbp/s connection which I would only see on the wired part of the network. Also when we moved to Eir Fibre, I had to use their somewhat larger modem to connect to my existing network and I had just left a lot of cables just lying around, everything was just pretty untidy.
So I took the plunge and ordered a Unify set of AP's and their Gateway to manage the whole lot. These are POE devices, so you can power them from their LAN connection - with a POE power adapter of course. It meant I had to run some new cabling but these would be ceiling mounted and the cables would be largely concealed. Also it would mean taking out the old wifi AP and a chance to today up the exposed cabling.
I also figured it would be better to hide a lot of this equipment away out of site, and rather conveniently I have a large crawl space under the house, big enough to mount a small 19inch rack into which I shoved the modem, gateway, lan switches, 2 NAS and a UPS backup. OK its a bit much for a house but if you are going to do it, do it right. And its a cool place to put this stuff.
I learnt a few things along the way. First, CAT6 cabling is harder to work with than CAT5 and the connectors are slightly different. I tried terminating the ends with CAT5 connectors which seemed to work but when I connected up my new AP's and tested them I was only getting 90Mb/s or so. It took me a while to realize it might be the brand new cabling I put in. I connected up a ready made cable to the AP and low and behold I was getting 800Mb/s. So my mistake. I had to buy a new crimp tool and connectors only 35Eu and redo all my terminations. That was a few hours of work that I could have done without.
I have to say that the unify equipment is top notch and the software excellent. Everything is easy to manage, both from the web and the app. You can see the uptime and latency stats on the network.
Initially there was some latency issues and drop outs which I put down to the modem. After a little research I could see that you could bypass the modem and connect the unify gateway direct to the ISP using PPPoE, which worked like a dream. I still had to use the gateway for the VoIP phone line but this is now connected in parallel so it won't interfere with the LAN.
The Unify gateway does firewall, DHCP and DNS, traffic monitoring, WIFI coverage testing and a few more things beside. And now everyone in every room gets a minimum 250Mbp/s way faster than the 50Mb/s with my old configuration. Money well spent I think.