If you were a Streamyx user converted to
Unifi, likely you have realized that you had enough LAN ports in Streamyx time but not with Unifi, well, if you fully utilized the 4 LAN ports on the Streamyx's ADSL router. This is because one LAN port marked in red color on the Unifi's wifi router is reserved for IPTV. That's what exactly hitting me when I upgraded from Streamyx to
Unifi.
Of course there is a virtually "zero-cost" solution by recycling the ADSL router you have. What you need to buy (if you don't have) is a short
crossover cable, power up the ADSL router, turn off or disable the wifi on ADSL router, connect one end of the crossover cable to LAN port on Unifi wifi router, connect the other end to the LAN port on the ADSL router and you're done with 5 available LAN ports to be used! Please note that it's LAN port on both the ADSL and Unifi wifi router
NOT the WAN port. Some modern routers come with
Auto MDIX feature that you don't even need to buy a crossover cable, a usual straight cable will do.
Well, alternative above is not ideal for me 'cause I need more than 5 connections. Further to that, I stream full HD Bluray contents from my
NAS to the media player (and might be multiple media players streaming simultaneously in near future), while some big files copy and downloads might be happening concurrently, therefore gigabit backbone is a must. To go a little more advance, I plan to segregate the local network into different segments, namely the
vlan - one for PC network, one for media streaming and the other for IP CCTV network. And for IP CCTV,
PoE feature is required to power up my IP cameras.
To my disappointment, the stock Unifi's Dlink wifi router cum switch has been struggling to even stream a jitter-free Bluray movie with no other activity in the local network, let alone to support my requirements above. As a result,
I finally found myself sufficient excuses to get an advanced switch...
