Home Network with Home Assistant OS and Unifi Switches
Home Network with Home Assistant OS and Unifi Switches
11.03.2022
Since we are in the process of moving, I am taking this opportunity to completely rebuild our home network.
Until now, I have always used a FritzBox for my home network, which has so far met all the requirements placed on it flawlessly. However, since our new place will have some more rooms with a bigger area, just a FritzBox might be too less for a good WiFi coverage for our new place. Furthermore, some PoE only devices are planned, therefore I decided to go for Unifi Switches and Access Points to bring the network to the customers, namely my wife and me.
Disclaimer: Yeah, what I'm going to do is overkill. And fun. And no reason not to do it. :)
Hardware
Internet for our future place will be brought to us via ugly and old rusty two-wire copper, serving VDSL. Unfortunately, fiber is not planned by the magenta ISP who will open the street and put in the new old copper cable anyways. But directly also putting fiber there... naaah. Sorry, back to topic.
Since it's VDSL, I need a modem, which is already integrated in my FritzBox 7590. As far as I know, Ubiquity does not offer any VDSL modems, and since FritzBox and Unifi networking stuff is known to work together, I will just use what I have here and not go for an additional manufacturer just for the modem. Therefore, the FritzBox will stay the central, serving as VDSL modem and main router.
For adding some more ports to my FritzBox, I went for a USW-PRO-48 switch, and since I mentioned something about PoE, also a USW-PRO-24-PoE switch will be part of the setup.
For managing the Unifi devices, a controller is required. Fortunately, I'm already running Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4 which offers to install the Unifi controller software as addon.