POE access points setup

paxo3

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If I wanted to set up four ubiquiti PoE access points throughout my home, should I buy a dedicated ubiquiti PoE switch?

Here's my current setup:
* Virgin Media Super Hub in modem mode connected to an ASUS RT-AC66U Router (ethernet only, WiFi on this is off).
* The ASUS router is connected to a larger Netgear GS724Tv4 switch.
* Currently connected to the ASUS router are two Ubiquiti access points (these are powered by the PoE injectors that come with the access points).
* On the ASUS router, all the ports are taken up by (Virgin modem / APx2 / netgear switch / NAS).
* The Netgear switch has quite a few spare ports.

I'm hoping to expand my network to a home office and my garage. For this I would require a further two access points.
The one in the home office will be PoE powered. The garage one could also be PoE powered, but's it's not absolutely necessary.
I'd like to keep all the access points ubiquiti gear so that I get seamless handoff between points.

The Ubiquiti PoE switches are pretty expensive and I'm trying to work out if it's worth the cost? It would feel nice to have all four Ubiquiti PoE products on one dedicated switch and get rid of all those injectors, but beyond that are there actually any practical reasons?

I've also never been sure if mixing switches will somehow affect traffic. Am I better to just put everything on my Netgear switch, does it even matter?
 
In all honesty, it doesnt really matter. POE switches are a potential single point of failure but they only take up one plug socket compared to four if you have 4 POE injectors.
Is there a reason why you dont have everything running off your 24 port switch, rather than having them plugged into the Asus router?

I have the same switch as you and 4 Unifi APs and they are all on POE injectors connected to one of two PDUs in my comms cabinet.
 
In all honesty, it doesnt really matter. POE switches are a potential single point of failure but they only take up one plug socket compared to four if you have 4 POE injectors.
Is there a reason why you dont have everything running off your 24 port switch, rather than having them plugged into the Asus router?

I have the same switch as you and 4 Unifi APs and they are all on POE injectors connected to one of two PDUs in my comms cabinet.

Yea, cool. I never thought about it like that. The locations are mostly based on power cable length / where the plug sockets are / laziness. If I expand to four access points, I'll want them all on the Netgear switch just so that I can tell what's what. The cabinet is a hot mess just now, maybe this will be an excuse for a cleanup.
 
There's multiple versions of POE, including some proprietary ones. But if you use "standards" based POE kit, then usually you can use anything with anything as long as it complies with the correct POE variant.

Just as ethernet is ethernet whoever implements it, there's no "vendor" specific variants of the "802" versions. (By definition, proprietary POE version are vendor specific.)

POE switches do tend to be a bit more expensive that non-POE switches simply because there's more "stuff" (the POE equipment) inside them. They often run a bit hotter too, so pay attention to whether your new switch has any active (fan) cooling - it might be noticeably noiser in a domestic setting.

Watch out for POE power "budget" - it's not at all unusual for a POE switch to not have capacity to deliver full POE power on all ports. Usually the switch will have an advertised total power "budget" available and you have to tot up the power requirements of all the attached devices requiring POE power delivery and ensure it's withing the available budget the switch can avail. It's worth leaving a fairly healthy bit of "headroom" on top to cope with variations and a lot of devices draw more power booting up than when they are in "steady state."

For example, back when POE was shiny and new, I was buying 24 port POE switches with around 100watt POE budget. That was fine for running a fair few VOIP phones that drew about 5 watts each, but when we bought some AP's that wanted 15 watts each (at that time, the most POE would supply per port) we had to juggle things around a bit to stay within the 100watts available.

Wiki's article on POE is a pretty good primer and cites the various standards.
 
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Depending on the UNiFi Poe switch you’ve seen it’s likely to be a managed switch which you probably don’t need But hence the price
 

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