We're renting at the moment and our landlord previously had our fiber internet under their account (it's a church so they already had a business account) but asked us to setup our own account instead of paying them the $75/mo on top of rent.

The ISP has since changed their business model to where the $75/mo no longer includes a router/access point combo. They now do a retrofit change so instead of a SC APC jack on the wall we'll get an ethernet port.

It's $10/mo to get their WiFi 6 router/access point so I used this as an opportunity to buy my own equipment instead of renting an outdated setup that really doesn't offer very much control.  

Went with the Cloud Gateway Max, U7 Pro Wall AP, desktop AP stand, and 30w POE+ injector. Going to re-use my Cisco Business 8 port gig dumb switch for my PC, TV, Apple TV, and Xbox. Eventually I'll get a 2.5 gig switch with POE+ but my PC is the only device I have that has a 2.5 gig port so it's not really a priority. Unifi just came out with the Flex Mini 5 port 2.5 gig switch for $49. I wish that product had a single POE+ port instead of an optional POE power in port (comes with a USB-C power port/power source as well).

I plan to run the AP off the CGM with the POE+ injector in the middle and then run a cable to the dumb switch.

I've been watching a lot of tutorials on setting up Unifi systems so hopefully it all goes smoothly

One thing I don't see them go over in the tutorials is the default channel width for unifi access points is set narrow for maximum compatibility or some shit.  I change them to max width which increases my speeds.  Speedtest shows I'm getting gbit speeds from my cell phone and laptop over wifi.  No clue what my max would be.  My ISP is the bottleneck.

Increasing the channel width can increase interference issues as well. Basically you are bonding channels together by increasing the frequency.

From what I've learned looking into what to set the frequency to 40mhz is the 'sweet spot' between speed, compatibility, and mitigating interference issues for the 5ghz band. I plan to set the 2.4ghz band to 20mhz. I'm only going to run this one AP for the entire house so I'd rather go with the middle ground leaning towards range. If we owned the house I'd run cable to the back of the house for a second AP but even with the ISP provided Wifi 6 AP I can get ~150 down in the furthest bedroom. The current ISP provided router/AP gives me zero control over channels so this is something I've been looking into.

https://www.7signal.com/news/blog/802-11ac-migration-part-2-whats-nobodys-telling-you-about-80mhz-and-160mhz-channel-bonding

There's been a few videos out on YouTube about mini 10" racks that were sponsored by the company that sells these .

$179 seems pretty steep so I found this blog post by this guy that did a guide a while ago about to build your own 10" mini rack here .

In the next month or two I plan to put together something similar to his setup. There are people on Etsy that sell 3D printed rack mounts for the compact Unifi gateways. 10" patch panels are available, and it's kind of overkill for a basic setup like what I'm doing but I want it to look good while also learning along the way.

This part jumped out at me. Unifi's switch lineup is really goofy right now, all I want is a 16-port 2.5gb PoE+ unit with 10gb uplinks, and none of that dumb Etherlighting crap. Maybe next year.

They do have a 16 port POE++/POE+ switch but its $400 + tax/shipping

I would need an 8 port 2.5 gig switch with at least 1 POE+ port but to get that you're spending $400 minimum with Unifi. There are Chinese offbrand switches that do that for a lot less but I don't trust them for longevity or warranty support amongst other issues.

I'd go for a Flex 2.5 gig 8 port with a couple of full POE+ ports for ~$120. There's been hints of more coming soon so hopefully something like that is on the horizon.

Ezpz to setup, you should be fine.

I can't do 40mhz wide since I can see something like a dozen other 2.4g networks around me.  Wish I could

Unifi's early forays into 10g let alone multi-gig seem to be really expensive when they come out.  A couple years ago I ended up with a Qnap QSW-M408-2C for my in between layer.

Kind of disappointing but but I think the change from being under a business account to being on our own residential account changed something at our ISP so now I'm lucky to get more than 800mbps down. Upload speeds are still the same at 950 up so it's not a bandwidth issue through the cabling or router.

The price difference between being residential or business is $25/mo but business has uptime guarantees and I think I'm going to go that route.

Are those speeds through the CGM?  Do you have IDS/IPS enabled?

I do but I did several speed tests with those settings off and it didn't make a difference. The Max is supposed to be able to do 1.5 gigs with it enabled so a gig down shouldn't be outside of it's capability.

Strange. I plugged my PC directly into the wall port bypassing the router and got the speed I was expecting.

Reconnected the cable to the router and now I'm getting full download speeds through it

I ran a speed test just before doing that and was only getting ~550 down. Now it's just under 900 down which is typical for this time of day.

No idea why that would 'fix' the issue but I'm happy now

Random physical-layer problems are the worst. Glad you're up and running right.

I have that Geeekpi 10" mini rack.

I have tried three different "half rack" UPS, none of them fit.

I am waiting on Geeekpi to release an UPS that will fit the mini rack.

It's definitely a frustrating space but would be great for people like me who want to run a 'lite' home setup but there's just a real lack of support for it here.

After a lot of research and messing around with settings I am thinking I am going to return the AP and gateway.

The UI on everything is great but just not getting the performance I was expecting and is somehow a downgrade over the cheapie Calix ISP provided unit we had before which was wifi 6.

Not just over ethernet but speeds are a downgrade by about 25% over wireless. My wife's phone which is 6E and getting nowhere near the speeds she should be.

I can get close to up into the ~800's over Ethernet off the router but can't crack 900 when I was able to pretty reliably before.

Now reading there a lot of issues with iPhone 16 devices on Unifi AP's not being able to auto negotiate and I plan to buy one fairly soon

I'm looking at a Netgate 4200 and finding a different wifi solution.

I'd be curious to see what your performance was like with a 'real' Unifi gateway like a UDM-P. There's only so much RAM and compute you can squeeze into something that small without tradeoffs.

I found out the UCG Ultra and Max have the same CPU but they claim the Max has 1.5 gig throughput while the Ultra has 1 gig. I suspect that neither are accurate.

I'm just not going to pay $500 for my own equipment and get shit performance based on what they advertise.

I do want to run my own equipment and all that to get a performance boost but it's been the exact opposite.

After doing more testing I think my original hypothesis is right and that going from a being under a business account to consumer put us in a pool that has more congestion throttling with our ISP. I got a call back about switching to our own business account but have to call them back when I get the time. I'm also pretty sure we had a DHCPv6 address with the Calix but the UCG won't pull one down.

I've seen other people with the UCG Max getting well over 1000Mbps down so the hardware is not the limitation. During the day and evening is when the DL speed is the worst. Past midnight I can get close to 900 down. Upload is almost always right at 940-950 which is what it always was on the business account and Calix unit. The first time I hooked my PC up to the wall outlet I got normal for me speeds but I did it again last night and the speeds weren't any better than going through the UCG.

I've been doing further network setup with VLAN's and setting up a guest network that is totally segmented off and limited to 20 down and up with a login screen. I also setup a rule to keep the Brother printer from communicating outside of the LAN but did have to put the 192 address its on in manually on my computer to find it which worked fine. My PC, the UCG Max, and AP are on a 172 internal IP. There are still a few things I have to get dialed in and have to research but going well