Updating My Home Network

My current home network needs some work. It’s not a bad network… Ubiquiti ER-4, ES-24, ES-16-POE, Unifi WiFi, Unifi Protect DVR with 3 cameras, a Qnap NAS, and a handful of servers all connected via 1 GbE with a 1Gb/s fiber WAN. This supports my family and a small (but internet intensive) home business. It was closer to the cutting edge when I last updated it back in 2019 and it’s overdue. ¹

My business could absolutely benefit from a boost in speed and since I’m on ATT fiber I could upgrade to 2Gb/s or even 5Gb/s, but my network would bottleneck since everything else is based on 1GbE. 2Gb/s would be the most cost effective at this time, but I’d like to make sure I could move to 5Gb/s in the future without having to go through this again. And who knows, ATT could roll out 10Gb/s at some point.

Internally, I want to update my LAN connections to 10GbE wherever possible for a bit of future proofing. Why not 2.5 or 5GbE? As of now, 2.5GbE networking is not really cheaper and 5GbE networking is almost non-existing. So what are my options?

1. Update my Ubiquiti stuff. It’s the Apple of networking. I like UniFi as a whole, but am souring on it because of costs, and assorted issues.

2. Change to something else. I’ve looked into Mikrotik, TP-Link Omada, and quite a few up-and-coming routers/switches that you can find over on ServeTheHome.

3. Some sort of network appliance or latest MiniForms computer that runs OpenWRT, pfSense, OpenSense, VyOS, or the like. But it’s not that much different than Option 2.

4. Build my own. It’s a rabbit hole, but one where I get to choose how deep I want to go. ²

Of course I’m going with option 4, I like rabbits.

Thanks for taking the time to read. Comments and questions are welcome.