Our old home network “worked”, insofar as most of the time we got good WiFi on our devices. However, small annoyances had built up - so it seemed like time for a change. This was the next network step after running Ethernet to the garage, and thankfully it was even easier!
Currently, the network runs a home server, some smart home devices (Thread/Matter devices running through HomePods/Apple TVs), occasional working from home, kids’ devices (at the moment this is just one iPad, but with more to come as the kids get older), and general household use.
The old setup
We had Plusnet FTTP on the 500Mbps plan.1 When things worked well (i.e. wired to the router or close to a WiFi access point) we did get 500 down/70 up.
The exact setup:
- 500Mbps FTTP, with the ONT in the understairs cupboard. Dynamic IP
- Plusnet Hub Two in the understairs cupboard, handling routing and DHCP, with WiFi turned off
- Four TP-Link Deco X55 nodes used as access points: family area, lounge, garage (wired), and bedroom (wireless backhaul)
- Mac mini in the lounge running NextDNS CLI (previously AdGuard Home) as the DNS server for the whole house
What was frustrating me
The Hub Two admin panel
This was very irritating to use for several reasons:
- The mobile interface was very poor, and changes were quite hard to make on a touchscreen.
- The desktop UI wasn’t much better - it was slow and it was fairly unclear how to make changes.
- Toggles didn’t seem to work despite looking like they should, and then you realised you had to click “change settings” before you could actually do anything.
- The settings were also quite limited when you could get them to work, and it very much seemed as if it was designed to stop you changing things rather than help you.
- Recently, they enforced HTTPS-only access. Fine. But it then took so much longer to load than it used to - even after clicking through the untrusted certificate warnings.
- It was hard to see what was on the network - the list wasn’t the easiest to find, and it was hard to see what was connected and what it was doing. There was poor device naming and grouping, and no useful history or traffic stats.
- The Hub Two couldn’t do encrypted DNS. The only way to use NextDNS through it was unencrypted and linked to our IP address, which would have needed DDNS to keep up with our dynamic IP - not something I wanted to do. So instead I used my Mac mini server, which relied on the server being up. Any downtime for updates meant the whole house’s internet was down. It was an extra point of failure for something that should just work.
- The APs all showed up as wired devices, so I couldn’t tell which devices were connected to which Deco.
The Deco app
The Deco app was the way to access WiFi settings. I ran the Decos in Access Point mode, which meant they didn’t handle the heavy lifting of DHCP/routing, and instead just provided the wireless signal.
I had a main and guest network set up, with the guest network not allowing access to LAN devices. However, this seemed to cause some difficulties with the DNS server being a LAN device, meaning ad-blocking wasn’t entirely network-wide. There was also an IoT network mode, but I could never get this to work.2
The app was very simplified, which is fine if you don’t want granular controls - but I do!
WiFi dropouts and poor mesh handoffs
This was not so much the Deco app as the X55s themselves. The WiFi dropped fairly often. I think this was mostly when roaming between rooms, as the connection switched from one Deco to another - but this is exactly what Deco meshes are meant to solve!
In the same vein were the Decos’ poor mesh handoffs - devices seemed to cling to a distant node instead of moving to the nearest one.
I added a fourth mesh node (via WiFi backhaul, rather than Ethernet) to improve speeds, but if anything this seemed to make them worse. The overall speeds actually improved after I installed the wired backhaul to the garage, as I think part of the issue was the WiFi backhaul using up spectrum. But even with three wired nodes, some issues persisted.
Speed and latency
Speed wasn’t generally the issue, but the WiFi would frequently spike to pings of >200ms on download and >600ms on upload. This was even with a fully wired backhaul and no units meshing via WiFi.
Choosing UniFi
So with the above taken into account, I needed to look for an alternative. After some Google-fu and Redditing, UniFi seemed a good choice.
There is one interface for everything, with good visibility over the whole network. I can access this away from home to make tweaks if needed, saving me from screen sharing into the Mac mini, which was patchy at best when away from home and needed a laptop rather than a phone.
There’s also no subscription, and regular firmware updates.
I looked at alternatives, but I couldn’t find anything that fully fit the bill. I considered pairing my Decos with a Cloud Gateway Ultra, which would fix the router/Plusnet UI issues but not the WiFi problems.
UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra
This is the Plusnet Hub replacement. It’s a compact gateway and controller in one box, and connects directly to the ONT without needing the Plusnet Hub as an intermediary. This gives the UniFi dashboard view of the network, and it allows encrypted DNS so my NextDNS profile can be run from the router.3
I considered the Fiber or Max versions, but these seemed like overkill as we don’t need storage on the gateway and have a sub-gigabit line.
Three U7 Express (UX7) access points
Next up - dealing with the WiFi. I looked at numerous options from UniFi for this - they make a lot of types of access point! I considered ceiling-mounted (unlikely to be wife-approved, and I’d need to get a PoE connection up there, which is more work) and wall-mounted (also needs PoE, and won’t fit over the media panels we have), before landing on the simple tabletop solution of the UX7.
All three units are wired - in the family area, lounge, and garage - exactly where the old Decos were.
As a bonus, these provide WiFi 7 with tri-band coverage, future-proofing the network as well.
The integration with the UniFi dashboard looked ideal - a great overview of clients, the ability to provide SSIDs for VLANs, and generally just the fabled “single pane of glass” view over the whole network.
Setup and migration
This was the easy part, really. Ubiquiti make it straightforward to set up their kit.
Planning the install
I split the switch over two evenings, so I’d only be fixing one thing at a time if anything went wrong. Plus, the kit arrived separately! Fortunately, the UCG arrived first, so I could set up the routing side while leaving the Decos doing the AP work.
I made sure the UniFi app was on my iPhone and signed into it,4 and that I had a note of my port forwards and the fixed IP addresses for certain clients on the network. As a backup, I kept a keyboard and mouse nearby so I could quickly get onto the Mac mini using the TV as a screen,5 as it was plugged in via Ethernet.6
Day one: out with the Hub Two, in with the UCG
The first evening was just the router. The Decos stayed exactly where they were and kept running the WiFi, so the only downtime was about half an hour without internet.
In the understairs cupboard I unplugged the Hub Two and moved the ONT’s cable into the UCG Ultra’s WAN port. I then plugged the cables from the ports that run to the Decos into the LAN ports. Once it had powered up, I joined the Deco WiFi on my phone and went through the initial setup process in the UniFi app.
Plusnet FTTP uses PPPoE, so it just needed my Plusnet username and password, with no VLAN. It didn’t connect straight away, as the ONT can hold on to the Hub Two’s old session, but one restart of the ONT and the UCG sorted it!
Once it was online I updated the firmware and set up the basics the same evening:
- Main network: kept the default range and recreated the WiFi with the same name and password as the Decos, so nothing would need reconnecting later. I left 2.4GHz on for older smart home devices.7
- Guest network: set up on its own range with client isolation, so guests can’t see each other or anything else on the network.
- DNS: I set up NextDNS as encrypted DNS (using DNS over HTTPS) on the UCG itself. This was one of the main reasons for the whole project.
- Remote access: recreated port forwards, gave the Mac mini its old fixed IP back, then checked that Screen Sharing, Tailscale, and my Docker stack all came back.
Success!
Day two: out with the Decos, in with the UX7s
The second day was the access points. The internet stayed up the whole time, and WiFi only dropped briefly as each one was swapped. I did all three one after another in a single sitting, rather than confusing things by running a mix of Deco and UniFi.
I started away from the lounge so the Mac mini stayed connected while I got used to the routine. For each one I unplugged the Deco, plugged the wall cable into the UX7’s uplink port, adopted it in the app as an access point, let it update, and named it after its room.
The lounge went last, with the Mac mini plugged into the UX7’s spare 2.5G port.
Because the WiFi name and password matched, everything reconnected on its own: phones, iPads, the Apple TV, and the smart home kit. A quick check that the guest WiFi worked and that I could still reach the Mac mini, and that was it.
First impressions
Most importantly, the WiFi dropouts have gone, and roaming between rooms is much better. The dashboard even shows when a device has roamed from one access point to another, which is really helpful, and it updates far quicker than the Deco app ever did.
I was hoping that enabling Smart Queues on the UCG Ultra would reduce my ping spikes. I am thrilled to say that this has worked! Pings now sit at around 30-50ms, with speeds much the same as before.8 I tried without it and got similar spikes to before, so it shows the UCG is able to manage traffic well with only a slight hit to upload speed.
I did enable critical apps prioritisation at one point, to see if this would keep traffic like FaceTime flowing well when other services were using download/upload. However, even with no critical apps running, it limited the speed to around 350Mbps. So back off it went, and the speeds jumped back up!
The UniFi dashboard is night and day compared to the Hub Two’s. There are so many more settings to tweak, and the UI is far better designed. There is a great overview of devices, traffic stats, and client history, and it is all accessible remotely as well.
No more single point of failure
The Mac mini is no longer a single point of failure - which is much better. If it is updating, we are no longer without internet the entire time. DNS filtering still works well, and the small trade-off of devices not being named in NextDNS, and instead all showing as coming from our IP address, is worth it.9
Was it worth it?
Yes, I think so. At just shy of £700 for the gateway and three access points, it wasn’t cheap, but the UniFi UI alone makes a massive difference, before you even get to all the extra features. I have seen firewall blocking logs that make me feel reassured (it was a bit of a black box with the Plusnet kit), and the device monitoring is much better.
What’s next? I would like some cameras, a NAS, an NVR (for the cameras), and Ethernet up to the loft, to possibly add a further AP in the landing ceiling and get the upstairs WiFi even better. But that’s a project for another day!
Update 28th October 2026
Locking down the server
A few days after the switch, the UCG’s intrusion prevention (IPS) flagged and blocked an intrusion attempt against Plex on the Mac mini. Plex is open to the internet through a port forward, which is what made it a target. Under the old setup I’d never have known this had happened, because the Hub Two had nothing like IPS - just a basic firewall.
It made me realise the Mac mini was sitting on the same network as everything else. If anyone ever did get into it, there would be nothing stopping them from reaching the rest of the house.
So I’ve moved the Mac mini onto its own “Servers” VLAN, a separate network that is firewalled off from our main devices. This wouldn’t have been possible at all on the old kit. The Hub Two doesn’t support VLANs or any kind of network segmentation, and the Decos couldn’t have carried a separate network to the Mac mini anyway (they only offered separate guest/IoT WiFi networks, and nothing for LAN ports in AP mode).
On UniFi it took one extra piece of kit. The UX7’s spare LAN port can’t be assigned to a VLAN, so I added a small UniFi Flex Mini switch between the lounge UX7 and the Mac mini, with the Mac mini’s port set to the Servers network. After that it was just a few settings in the dashboard. Plex, Screen Sharing, and everything else on the Mac mini still work, but the server is now walled off from the rest of the house.
It’s a good example of why I made the switch!10
Footnotes
-
Although I did find out during the setup process that we could get 900Mbps for only 50p a month more. A no-brainer, so we did! ↩︎
-
Admittedly this was with a very finicky Vaillant gateway, which took several attempts to even connect to my normal network. ↩︎
-
Phew, no more worries about macOS updates knocking the internet off entirely! ↩︎
-
Whilst I still had internet - we have very poor mobile signal at home! ↩︎
-
The first time since initial setup that this was a consideration, rather than the usual SSH sessions or screen sharing! ↩︎
-
Just shows how many of my devices rely on WiFi. There’s no Ethernet port on my MacBook and I don’t have a USB-C to RJ45 adapter - it might be a consideration for the future, though. ↩︎
-
This didn’t take effect straight away - it was a dormant setting just waiting for the UX7s to be plugged in and adopted. As I was already in the UCG setup, I thought I might as well make my next job easier! ↩︎
-
And now that we’ve moved to the new package, we’re getting the promised 900 down and 110 up! ↩︎
-
The device names were added by the NextDNS CLI running on the Mac mini. There is a way to get this onto the UCG Ultra, but some information I’ve read online suggests it doesn’t persist after firmware updates. I didn’t want to risk that, and it’s a very minor trade-off. ↩︎
-
Pun only partially intended. ↩︎