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TP-Link Omada or Ubiquiti Unifi?
Update: what I think I'm going with... anything I should add or swap out?
Tl;dr: which would you choose, and why?
I'm looking to up my home networking game. For years I've rocked just a cable modem and wi-fi router. I recently bought my first NAS to set up Jellyfin, and fell down the homelab rabbit hole :-)
I have 300Mb/s cable internet, and discovered it's actully delivering ~370Mb/s. Unfortunately my wi-fi performance was degraded to only ~40Mb/s in the office (via AP1 -> AP2 -> base wi-fi router). Restarting the mesh wi-fi router / APs got that up to 90Mb/s in the office, and ~145Mb/s on my phone near the router (so no hops through the APs).
The NAS has 10GbE as well as Thunderbolt 4 (good for up to 40Gb I believe). The only place I can plug it into my network is in the living room, where the wi-fi router lives (as that's where the cable comes in). That means I can't take advantage of the Thunderbolt port, as my computer lives in the office :-(
So I'm looking to to run two Cat6 lines from the office (upstairs) into the attic, down an interior wall into the crawlspace, then up the exterior wall into the living room. One line will be the uplink to the cable modem from a router in the office, and the other a 10Gb downlink to a sub-router in the LR for the TV, stereo, Apple 4k, etc network through.
I plan to buy a rackable router with 1GbE WAN (I don't expect to ever need/want a faster internet connection than that) and at least a couple of 10GbE SFP+ ports; in the future I may want to add a PoE capable switch, more Cat6 lines for security cameras and network drops to other locations in the house, a patch panel and cable management solution if/when I get enough lines installed to warrant it, maybe one or more rackable servers as I get more into the whole homelab thing :-) and so on. And of course a new wi-fi AP.
Unifi seems to be popular, but more expensive; Omada looks pretty comparable, and more affordable. I work for a subsidiary of Cisco, so I also looked at Meraki, but it looks like that gets way more pricey.
Any other options I should look at? What equipment would you recommend?
TP-Link is the most overrated networking brand out there IMHO. Nobody remembers when they used to be a budget trash brand? I truly believe they're just trying really hard to rebrand the same junk that and people are falling for it.
I remember it, it made my life hell at one point. Hence, my distrust.
You can still find the crappy models if you want but some models aren’t so bad for their price point and there are worse options.