chiisana

You can achieve higher than 1Gbit/s throughput if your wireless devices are connected to the same AP.

I.e. you can transfer photos between your phone and laptop wirelessly if both devices are on MCS index 11 1024 QAM using 2 spatial streams in ideal environment…. Not likely, but it could happen.

Sounds like that’s a bad experience resulted from what could’ve been avoided through proper backup management practices. Hardware failures are inevitable, and it is always prudent to manage backups appropriately. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not backing up my controller data properly, but at least mine is on a VM powered by a RAID array that I take snapshot semi regularly. Should the VM corrupt itself somehow, and I cannot get my backups deployed, I’d probably be hosed and have to restart from scratch, but that’d be on me for not testing my DRP.

For most SMEs, paying consumer grade equipment is out of the question, and paying for true enterprise grade stacks Meraki / Aruba might be out of the question due to budget constraints. Ubiquiti strikes a happy median for them, and residential users that want to opt for a bit more.

So how deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go? For most people, not going to lie, get a high end “gaming router” for smaller place, or a big brand “mesh network” and you’ll be set. Blasphemy for the networking crowd, I know, I know. But at the end of the day, if you’re not planning to spend time setting things up and tinker, there’s not a lot to be gained going further.

However, if you’re willing to put in the time to learn and tinker, Ubiquiti is a good prosumer entry point. Their product line up has gotten quite confusing in the last little bit but the general idea is the same: You’d need 4 parts to form an actual network:

1. A controller/manager — this is the “S” in SDN, Software Defined Networking; where you can manage your network settings
2. A router/gateway — this does the routing on your network and provides entry/exit from your network
3. One or more switches — this allows you to plug more hardwired devices into your network
4. One or more wireless access points — this gives your network wireless capabilities

Some Ubiquiti devices covers more than one of those areas; for example the UDM mentioned actually covers all 4 areas, whereas, confusing as it may sound, the UDM Pro only covers 3 (no built in access point). This is because if you’re planning to cover a larger site, you may not want your wireless access point to be situated where your gateway is, and you’d rather the option to have hard disk trays to help keep more recordings from your security cameras.

Figuring out what your needs are, picking out the components, and figuring out where to place them is going to be part of the process. If this doesn’t sound appealing, that’s perfectly fine, but it may help you figure out the path you’d want to take forward.

This is really just best practice for any arbitrary sort of external access; even if you’re using some sort of VPN (wireguard, tailscale doesn’t matter) to get back into your network, as long as there’s an external way into your network, you want to drop that into its own isolated area so in the event a malicious attacker gets through, they’re sandboxed to the area you allow them to.

If you use everything from the same vendor, you could manage them in one place (see Ubiquiti’s UniFi stack as example), but at the end of the day, they serve different purposes and target different parts of your network.

There is only one router on your network. It routes traffic from one machine to another. This is typically also the gateway, and it only has so many ports.

If you want more physical devices connected to your network, you’d need switches to fan out your network.

Un-managed switches essentially takes packets from one port and pass them through another port, easy peasy, nothing fancy.

Managed switches, however, can do more than just take packet from one port, then push it out to the other side. You can set up link aggregation for example, allowing more throughput by using two or more ports to go to the same destination (maybe for example a central file server). You can have L2 vs L3 switches so they route differently. You can have multiple paths to reach another machine, for redundancy but must implement STP to prevent broadcast loops etc.

Once your network grows larger than just Internet for a couple of desktops, it gets a lot more interesting.