Recommended products

Why we like it

The most common mistake in home networking is buying one expensive access point instead of two cheap ones.

In a house the constraint is almost never the radio specification — it is walls. Two well-placed U6+ units will comfortably beat a single flagship in a typical three-bedroom house, cost less in total, and give you roaming that actually works.

It also runs on 802.3af, the lowest PoE tier, so a small cheap switch carries several of them. A floor of Wi-Fi 7 access points needs a far larger power budget.

6 GHz in a home is largely academic: the coverage is smaller, wall penetration is worse, and a good share of household devices cannot use it anyway.

Why we like it

We lean Ubiquiti on this site, so it is worth being clear about when we do not.

If a business has no IT staff at all and nobody who will ever log into a controller, this is the better buy. There is nothing to run, nothing to patch, and nothing that fails and takes your management plane with it.

The radios are 4x4 on both bands, which is a better specification than most access points near this price and shows with several simultaneous clients. Aruba's RF engineering heritage is real.

What you give up is depth — VLANs, per-device keys, firewall rules, topology. If you will want those later, start with UniFi instead, because moving across means changing platform.

No 6 GHz either. In a quiet office with a mixed client estate that matters less than the specification sheet implies.

Why we like it

This is on the list for one specific person: the engineer who wants a lab, or is studying for a routing certification, or enjoys the configuration as much as the result.

The feature-per-pound ratio is extraordinary. Full BGP, OSPF, policy routing, a serious firewall, VPN of every description, container support and a 2.5 GbE port at this price is not matched by anything.

It will defeat a non-technical buyer, and we would not hand it to one. RouterOS is powerful and unforgiving, and the default configuration needs hardening before it faces the internet.

The configuration we would actually build with it: MikroTik as the router, separate UniFi access points for the Wi-Fi. That plays to the strengths of both, and the wireless management here is control rather than intelligence.

Why we like it

A small, silent, properly managed PoE switch is a surprisingly hard thing to buy from anyone else at this price.

The number that matters is the 52 W total power budget. A U6+ draws around 13 W, so four fit comfortably. A U7 Pro draws around 21 W, so three is the realistic ceiling.

Check that arithmetic before you order, because exceeding the budget makes access points fail to power up or quietly run degraded — and the symptom looks exactly like a Wi-Fi problem.

Being fanless matters more than it sounds. This can live in a cupboard off a living room without anyone noticing it.

Why we like it

This is the line item most wireless projects forget, and the one that decides whether the access points you just bought can perform at all.

A Wi-Fi 7 access point on a 1 GbE port cannot deliver Wi-Fi 7. On insufficient PoE it will boot, join the controller, report itself healthy — and silently disable a radio.

This switch fixes both: multi-gigabit access ports, 802.3bt where it is needed, 10G SFP+ uplinks so the switch is not the bottleneck, and a serious total power budget.

Two caveats worth knowing before you buy: it has audible fans, so it belongs in a comms room, and there is one power supply with no redundancy option. Plan for a UPS and a spare rather than expecting resilience from the box.

Why we like it

The honest case for this one is narrow, and it is the outdoor case. A properly managed, PoE-powered, weather-resistant access point for a garden, courtyard or outbuilding, at a price that does not require a project.

Two things we like: the 5 GHz radio is 4x4, which gives it a better backhaul link than most mesh hardware, and it can be wired later without being replaced — so it is a reasonable hedge if you might run a cable eventually.

The advice we always give with it: place it halfway, not in the problem area. A mesh node extends whatever signal it receives, so a node sitting in a weak spot extends a weak signal. And if you can run a cable to where this would go, run the cable and buy a U6+ instead — you will spend less and get a better result.

Why we like it

We recommend UniFi to most households that will tolerate a small amount of setup. This is here for the households that will not, and that is a real category.

No controller, no adoption, no VLAN concepts. Somebody non-technical sets it up and it keeps working.

The feature worth paying for is the dedicated backhaul radio. A dual-band mesh node uses the same radio for clients and for talking to its parent, roughly halving throughput per hop. A third radio avoids that, and in a two-node setup it is often the difference between acceptable and frustrating.

Two things we would tell anyone buying it: use wired backhaul if you possibly can — every tri-band system supports it, and one cable converts the mesh into a set of properly connected access points — and ignore the coverage figure on the box, which assumes conditions your house does not have.

Why we like it

The economics here have nothing to do with the hardware. A pair of these costs a fraction of trenching a duct across a car park, and takes an afternoon instead of a week.

They genuinely pair themselves out of the box, which is not something we say about much wireless kit.

Two conditions, both absolute: clear line of sight, and a rigid mount. The most common cause of an unstable bridge link is a pole that moves in the wind, not the radio. Survey the path in summer, when the trees have leaves on them.

Not the right answer for a link you genuinely cannot lose — 60 GHz suffers rain fade, and anything carrying clinical systems or payment deserves fibre.